AUTHOR=Zhou Yuan-Ke , Shen Zi-Ang , Yu Han , Luo Tao , Gao Yang , Du Pu-Feng 

TITLE=Predicting lncRNA–Protein Interactions With miRNAs as Mediators in a Heterogeneous Network Model

JOURNAL=Frontiers in Genetics

VOLUME=Volume 10 - 2019

YEAR=2020

URL=https://www.frontiersin.org/journals/genetics/articles/10.3389/fgene.2019.01341

DOI=10.3389/fgene.2019.01341

ISSN=1664-8021

ABSTRACT=Long non-coding RNAs (lncRNAs) play important roles in various biological processes, where lncRNA-protein interactions are usually involved. Therefore, identifying lncRNA-protein interactions is of great significance to the understanding of lncRNA molecular functions. Since the experiments to identify lncRNA-protein interactions are always costly and time consuming, computational methods are developed as alternative approaches. However, existing lncRNA-protein interaction predictors usually require prior knowledge of lncRNA-protein interactions with experimental evidences. Their performances are limited due to the number of known lncRNA-protein interactions. In this paper, we explore a different way to predict lncRNA-protein interactions without direct prior knowledge. We introduced miRNAs as mediators to estimate potential interactions between lncRNAs and proteins. By validating our results using the direct lncRNA-protein interactions, our method achieved an AUROC (Area Under Receiver Operating Curve) of 0.82, which is comparable to the state-of-the-art methods. Our method can be a useful supplement to the existing methods, as it provides an alternative way to estimate lncRNA-protein interactions in a heterogeneous network without direct prior knowledge.