Machine learning in the estimation of CRISPR-Cas9 cleavage sites for plant system.

CRISPR-Cas9 system is one of the recent most used genome editing techniques. Despite having a high capacity to alter the precise target genes and genomic regions that the planned guide RNA (or sgRNA) complements, the off-target effect still exists. But there are already machine learning algorithms for people, animals, and a few plant species. In this paper, an effort has been made to create models based on three machine learning-based techniques [namely, artificial neural networks (ANN), support vector machines (SVM), and random forests (RF)] for the prediction of the CRISPR-Cas9 cleavage sites that will be cleaved by a particular sgRNA. The plant dataset was the sole source of inspiration for all of these machine learning-based algorithms. 70% of the on-target and off-target dataset of various plant species that was gathered was used to train the models. The remaining 30% of the data set was used to evaluate the model's performance using a variety of evaluation metrics, including specificity, sensitivity, accuracy, precision, F1 score, F2 score, and AUC. Based on the aforementioned machine learning techniques, eleven models in all were developed. Comparative analysis of these produced models suggests that the model based on the random forest technique performs better. The accuracy of the Random Forest model is 96.27%, while the AUC value was found to be 99.21%. The SVM-Linear, SVM-Polynomial, SVM-Gaussian, and SVM-Sigmoid models were trained, making a total of six ANN-based models (ANN1-Logistic, ANN1-Tanh, ANN1-ReLU, ANN2-Logistic, ANN2-Tanh, and ANN-ReLU) and Support Vector Machine models (SVM-Linear, SVM-Polynomial, SVM-Gaussian However, the overall performance of Random Forest is better among all other ML techniques. ANN1-ReLU and SVM-Linear model performance were shown to be better among Artificial Neural Network and Support Vector Machine-based models, respectively.