MOTIVATION: A single gene may yield several isoforms with different functions through alternative splicing. Continuous efforts are devoted to developing machine-learning methods to predict isoform functions. However, existing methods do not consider the relevance of each feature to specific functions and ignore the noise caused by the irrelevant features. In this case, we hypothesize that constructing a feature selection framework to extract the function-relevant features might help improve the model accuracy in isoform function prediction. RESULTS: In this article, we present a feature selection-based approach named IsoFrog to predict isoform functions. First, IsoFrog adopts a reversible jump Markov Chain Monte Carlo (RJMCMC)-based feature selection framework to assess the feature importance to gene functions. Second, a sequential feature selection procedure is applied to select a subset of function-relevant features. This strategy screens the relevant features for the specific function while eliminating irrelevant ones, improving the effectiveness of the input features. Then, the selected features are input into our proposed method modified domain-invariant partial least squares, which prioritizes the most likely positive isoform for each positive MIG and utilizes diPLS for isoform function prediction. Tested on three datasets, our method achieves superior performance over six state-of-the-art methods, and the RJMCMC-based feature selection framework outperforms three classic feature selection methods. We expect this proposed methodology will promote the identification of isoform functions and further inspire the development of new methods. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: IsoFrog is freely available at https://github.com/genemine/IsoFrog.

Alternative splicing has a significant impact in the process of gene regulation and it greatly raises the complexity of protein species and functions. At present, the gene function has been extensively studied, and there are multiple public databases of gene function annotations. Due to the high cost and the large number of isoforms, it is currently impossible to conduct extensive experimental analysis on isoform functions. Functions at the level of splicing isoforms remain largely unknown. Computational prediction provides an alternative to functional annotation of splice isoforms. Here we present GraphIsoFun, a novel computational approach to predict isoform function by integrating both gene and isoform-level expression information with graph neural network. It first constructs a heterogeneous co-expression network with both genes and isoforms being nodes. This network integrates the rich association between isoforms and genes, and provides a bridge for connecting isoform and gene functions. Then GraphIsoFun uses the graph neural network to mine the information of the co-expression network and obtains the final prediction score of isoforms for each function. The experiments on multiple datasets show that GraphIsoFun surpasses existing methods based on different evaluation indicators.

MOTIVATION: High resolution annotation of gene functions is a central goal in functional genomics. A single gene may produce multiple isoforms with different functions through alternative splicing. Conventional approaches, however, consider a gene as a single entity without differentiating these functionally different isoforms. Towards understanding gene functions at higher resolution, recent efforts have focused on predicting the functions of isoforms. However, the performance of existing methods is far from satisfactory mainly because of the lack of isoform-level functional annotation. RESULTS: We present IsoResolve, a novel approach for isoform function prediction, which leverages the information from gene function prediction models with domain adaptation (DA). IsoResolve treats gene-level and isoform-level features as source and target domains, respectively. It uses DA to project the two domains into a latent variable space in such a way that the latent variables from the two domains have similar distribution, which enables the gene domain information to be leveraged for isoform function prediction. We systematically evaluated the performance of IsoResolve in predicting functions. Compared with five state-of-the-art methods, IsoResolve achieved significantly better performance. IsoResolve was further validated by case studies of genes with isoform-level functional annotation. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: IsoResolve is freely available at https://github.com/genemine/IsoResolve. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.