HD-6mAPred: a hybrid deep learning approach for accurate prediction of N6-methyladenine sites in plant species.

Background: N6-methyladenine (6mA) is an important DNA methylation modification that serves a crucial function in various biological activities. Accurate prediction of 6mA sites is essential for elucidating its biological function and underlying mechanism. Although existing methods have achieved great success, there remains a pressing need for improved prediction accuracy and generalization cap ability across diverse species. This study aimed to develop a robust method to address these challenges. Methods: We proposed HD-6mAPred, a hybrid deep learning model that combines bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU), convolutional neural network (CNN) and attention mechanism, along with various DNA sequence coding schemes. Firstly, DNA sequences were encoded using four different ways: one-hot encoding, electron-ion interaction pseudo-potential (EIIP), enhanced nucleic acid composition (ENAC) and nucleotide chemical properties (NCP). Secondly, a hold-out search strategy was employed to identify the optimal features or feature combinations for both BiGRU and CNN. Finally, the attention mechanism was introduced to weigh the importance of features derived from the BiGRU and CNN. Results: A series of experiments on the