ShapeGTB: the role of local DNA shape in prioritization of functional variants in human promoters with machine learning.

We demonstrate that GC-content of the local sequence fragments and local DNA shape features play significant role in prioritization of functional variants and outscore features related to histone modifications, transcription factors binding sites, or evolutionary conservation descriptors. Those observations allowed us to build specialized machine learning classifier identifying functional single nucleotide polymorphisms within promoter regions-ShapeGTB. We compared our method with more general tools predicting pathogenicity of all non-coding variants. ShapeGTB outperformed them by a wide margin (average precision 0.93 vs. 0.47-0.55). On the external validation set based on ClinVar database it displayed worse performance but was still competitive with other methods (average precision 0.47 vs. 0.23-0.42). Such results suggest unique characteristics of mutations located within promoter regions and are a promising signal for the development of more accurate variant prioritization tools in the future.