DNA methylation is one of the earliest epigenetic regulation mechanisms discovered and studied extensively, and it is critical for normal development, diseases, and gene expression. As a newly discovered chemical modification of DNA, N4-acetyldeoxycytosine (4acC) was recently shown to be abundant in Arabidopsis and highly associated with gene expression and actively transcribed genes. Precise identification of 4acC is essential for studying its biological function. We proposed the 4acCPred, the first weakly supervised learning computational framework for predicting 4acC-carrying regions from Arabidopsis genomic DNA sequences. 4acCPred also provides motif mining through model interpretation. The motifs found by 4acCPred are consistent with existing knowledge, indicating that the model successfully captured real biological signals. Our framework and web server should serve as useful tools for 4acC research.
