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miDGD: a multi-modal deep generative model predicts miRNA expression from bulk or single-cell mRNA expression

Zamani, F.; Rasmussen, A. M.; Schuster, V.; Diekema, M. H.; Krogh, A.; Pedersen, J. S.

2026-06-02 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.05.29.727918 bioRxiv
Show abstract

MicroRNAs (miRNAs) are important post-transcriptional regulators, yet their expression is typically unobserved in single-cell and most bulk RNA-seq datasets. We present miDGD, a deep generative decoder model that predicts miRNA abundance directly from gene expression alone. Trained on bulk and single-cell datasets from TCGA, GTEx, and human cell lines, miDGD learned a shared latent representation of matched mRNA and miRNA profiles that organized samples into biologically meaningful clusters reflecting tissue and cancer types. The model reconstructed both tissue-specific and broadly expressed miRNAs, recapitulated known miRNA-target relationships, and showed robust performance in sparse and single-cell data. miDGD outperformed miRSCAPE and recent miRNA activity inference methods, with improved cross-dataset generalization. These results establish a deep generative model as an improved framework for predicting miRNA expression when direct measurements are unavailable.

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