Frontiers in Pharmacology (May 2024)

MPASL: multi-perspective learning knowledge graph attention network for synthetic lethality prediction in human cancer

  • Ge Zhang,
  • Ge Zhang,
  • Yitong Chen,
  • Yitong Chen,
  • Chaokun Yan,
  • Chaokun Yan,
  • Jianlin Wang,
  • Jianlin Wang,
  • Wenjuan Liang,
  • Wenjuan Liang,
  • Junwei Luo,
  • Huimin Luo,
  • Huimin Luo

DOI
https://doi.org/10.3389/fphar.2024.1398231
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 15

Abstract

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Synthetic lethality (SL) is widely used to discover the anti-cancer drug targets. However, the identification of SL interactions through wet experiments is costly and inefficient. Hence, the development of efficient and high-accuracy computational methods for SL interactions prediction is of great significance. In this study, we propose MPASL, a multi-perspective learning knowledge graph attention network to enhance synthetic lethality prediction. MPASL utilizes knowledge graph hierarchy propagation to explore multi-source neighbor nodes related to genes. The knowledge graph ripple propagation expands gene representations through existing gene SL preference sets. MPASL can learn the gene representations from both gene-entity perspective and entity-entity perspective. Specifically, based on the aggregation method, we learn to obtain gene-oriented entity embeddings. Then, the gene representations are refined by comparing the various layer-wise neighborhood features of entities using the discrepancy contrastive technique. Finally, the learned gene representation is applied in SL prediction. Experimental results demonstrated that MPASL outperforms several state-of-the-art methods. Additionally, case studies have validated the effectiveness of MPASL in identifying SL interactions between genes.

Keywords