Identifying N6-methyladenosine sites using multi-interval nucleotide pair position specificity and support vector machine

N6-methyladenosine (m(6)A) refers to methylation of the adenosine nucleotide acid at the nitrogen-6 position. It plays an important role in a series of biological processes, such as splicing events, mRNA exporting, nascent mRNA synthesis, nuclear translocation and translation process. Numerous experiments have been done to successfully characterize m(6)A sites within sequences since high-resolution mapping of m(6)A sites was established. However, as the explosive growth of genomic sequences, using experimental methods to identify m(6)A sites are time-consuming and expensive. Thus, it is highly desirable to develop fast and accurate computational identification methods. In this study, we propose a sequence-based predictor called RAM-NPPS for identifying m(6)A sites within RNA sequences, in which we present a novel feature representation algorithm based on multi-interval nucleotide pair position specificity, and use support vector machine classifier to construct the prediction model. Comparison results show that our proposed method outperforms the state-of-the-art predictors on three benchmark datasets across the three species, indicating the effectiveness and robustness of our method. Moreover, an online webserver implementing the proposed predictor has been established at http://server.malab.cn/RAM-NPPS/. It is anticipated to be a useful prediction tool to assist biologists to reveal the mechanisms of m(6)A site functions.