1
|
Ramos-Llorens M, Bello-Madruga R, Valle J, Andreu D, Torrent M. PyAMPA: a high-throughput prediction and optimization tool for antimicrobial peptides. mSystems 2024:e0135823. [PMID: 38934543 DOI: 10.1128/msystems.01358-23] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/23/2023] [Accepted: 05/27/2024] [Indexed: 06/28/2024] Open
Abstract
The alarming rise of antibiotic-resistant bacterial infections is driving efforts to develop alternatives to conventional antibiotics. In this context, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have emerged as promising candidates for their ability to target a broad range of microorganisms. However, the development of AMPs with optimal potency, selectivity, and/or stability profiles remains a challenge. To address it, computational tools for predicting AMP properties and designing novel peptides have gained increasing attention. PyAMPA is a novel platform for AMP discovery. It consists of five modules, namely AMPScreen, AMPValidate, AMPSolve, AMPMutate, and AMPOptimize, that allow high-throughput proteome inspection, candidate screening, and optimization through point-mutation and genetic algorithms. The platform also offers additional tools for predicting and evaluating AMP properties, including antimicrobial and cytotoxic activity, and peptide half-life. By providing innovative and accessible inroads into AMP motifs in proteomes, PyAMPA will enable advances in AMP development and potential translation into clinically useful molecules. PyAMPA is available at: https://github.com/SysBioUAB/PyAMPA. IMPORTANCE This paper introduces PyAMPA, a new bioinformatics platform designed for the discovery and optimization of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). It addresses the urgent need for new antimicrobials due to the rise of antibiotic-resistant infections. PyAMPA, with its five predictive modules -AMPScreen, AMPValidate, AMPSolve, AMPMutate and AMPOptimize, enables high-throughput screening of proteomes to identify potential AMP motifs and optimize them for clinical use. Its unique approach, combining prediction, design, and optimization tools, makes PyAMPA a robust solution for developing new AMP-based therapies, offering a significant advance in combatting antibiotic resistance.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Marc Ramos-Llorens
- Systems Biology of Infection Lab, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biosciences Faculty, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
| | - Roberto Bello-Madruga
- Systems Biology of Infection Lab, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biosciences Faculty, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
| | - Javier Valle
- Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, Department of Medicine and Life Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
| | - David Andreu
- Barcelona Biomedical Research Park, Department of Medicine and Life Sciences, Universitat Pompeu Fabra, Barcelona, Spain
| | - Marc Torrent
- Systems Biology of Infection Lab, Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biosciences Faculty, Universitat Autònoma de Barcelona, Barcelona, Spain
| |
Collapse
|
2
|
Shaon MSH, Karim T, Sultan MF, Ali MM, Ahmed K, Hasan MZ, Moustafa A, Bui FM, Al-Zahrani FA. AMP-RNNpro: a two-stage approach for identification of antimicrobials using probabilistic features. Sci Rep 2024; 14:12892. [PMID: 38839785 PMCID: PMC11153637 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-63461-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 02/16/2024] [Accepted: 05/29/2024] [Indexed: 06/07/2024] Open
Abstract
Antimicrobials are molecules that prevent the formation of microorganisms such as bacteria, viruses, fungi, and parasites. The necessity to detect antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) using machine learning and deep learning arises from the need for efficiency to accelerate the discovery of AMPs, and contribute to developing effective antimicrobial therapies, especially in the face of increasing antibiotic resistance. This study introduced AMP-RNNpro based on Recurrent Neural Network (RNN), an innovative model for detecting AMPs, which was designed with eight feature encoding methods that are selected according to four criteria: amino acid compositional, grouped amino acid compositional, autocorrelation, and pseudo-amino acid compositional to represent the protein sequences for efficient identification of AMPs. In our framework, two-stage predictions have been conducted. Initially, this study analyzed 33 models on these feature extractions. Then, we selected the best six models from these models using rigorous performance metrics. In the second stage, probabilistic features have been generated from the selected six models in each feature encoding and they are aggregated to be fed into our final meta-model called AMP-RNNpro. This study also introduced 20 features with SHAP, which are crucial in the drug development fields, where we discover AAC, ASDC, and CKSAAGP features are highly impactful for detection and drug discovery. Our proposed framework, AMP-RNNpro excels in the identification of novel Amps with 97.15% accuracy, 96.48% sensitivity, and 97.87% specificity. We built a user-friendly website for demonstrating the accurate prediction of AMPs based on the proposed approach which can be accessed at http://13.126.159.30/ .
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Md Shazzad Hossain Shaon
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University, Daffodil Smart City, Birulia, Dhaka, 1216, Bangladesh
| | - Tasmin Karim
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University, Daffodil Smart City, Birulia, Dhaka, 1216, Bangladesh
| | - Md Fahim Sultan
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University, Daffodil Smart City, Birulia, Dhaka, 1216, Bangladesh
| | - Md Mamun Ali
- Health Informatics Research Lab, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University, Daffodil Smart City, Birulia, Dhaka, 1216, Bangladesh
- Division of Biomedical Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A9, Canada
- Department of Software Engineering, Daffodil International University, Daffodil Smart City (DSC), Birulia, Savar, Dhaka, 1216, Bangladesh
| | - Kawsar Ahmed
- Health Informatics Research Lab, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University, Daffodil Smart City, Birulia, Dhaka, 1216, Bangladesh.
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A9, Canada.
- Group of Bio-photomatiχ, Information and Communication Technology, Mawlana Bhashani Science and Technology University, Santosh, Tangail, 1902, Bangladesh.
| | - Md Zahid Hasan
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University, Daffodil Smart City, Birulia, Dhaka, 1216, Bangladesh
- Health Informatics Research Lab, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, Daffodil International University, Daffodil Smart City, Birulia, Dhaka, 1216, Bangladesh
| | - Ahmed Moustafa
- Department of Human Anatomy and Physiology, The Faculty of Health Sciences, University of Johannesburg, Johannesburg, South Africa
- School of Psychology, Centre for Data Analytics, Bond University, Gold Coast, QLD, Australia
| | - Francis M Bui
- Department of Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Saskatchewan, 57 Campus Drive, Saskatoon, SK, S7N 5A9, Canada
| | | |
Collapse
|
3
|
Akbar S, Zou Q, Raza A, Alarfaj FK. iAFPs-Mv-BiTCN: Predicting antifungal peptides using self-attention transformer embedding and transform evolutionary based multi-view features with bidirectional temporal convolutional networks. Artif Intell Med 2024; 151:102860. [PMID: 38552379 DOI: 10.1016/j.artmed.2024.102860] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/27/2023] [Revised: 02/21/2024] [Accepted: 03/25/2024] [Indexed: 04/26/2024]
Abstract
Globally, fungal infections have become a major health concern in humans. Fungal diseases generally occur due to the invading fungus appearing on a specific portion of the body and becoming hard for the human immune system to resist. The recent emergence of COVID-19 has intensely increased different nosocomial fungal infections. The existing wet-laboratory-based medications are expensive, time-consuming, and may have adverse side effects on normal cells. In the last decade, peptide therapeutics have gained significant attention due to their high specificity in targeting affected cells without affecting healthy cells. Motivated by the significance of peptide-based therapies, we developed a highly discriminative prediction scheme called iAFPs-Mv-BiTCN to predict antifungal peptides correctly. The training peptides are encoded using word embedding methods such as skip-gram and attention mechanism-based bidirectional encoder representation using transformer. Additionally, transform-based evolutionary features are generated using the Pseduo position-specific scoring matrix using discrete wavelet transform (PsePSSM-DWT). The fused vector of word embedding and evolutionary descriptors is formed to compensate for the limitations of single encoding methods. A Shapley Additive exPlanations (SHAP) based global interpolation approach is applied to reduce training costs by choosing the optimal feature set. The selected feature set is trained using a bi-directional temporal convolutional network (BiTCN). The proposed iAFPs-Mv-BiTCN model achieved a predictive accuracy of 98.15 % and an AUC of 0.99 using training samples. In the case of the independent samples, our model obtained an accuracy of 94.11 % and an AUC of 0.98. Our iAFPs-Mv-BiTCN model outperformed existing models with a ~4 % and ~5 % higher accuracy using training and independent samples, respectively. The reliability and efficacy of the proposed iAFPs-Mv-BiTCN model make it a valuable tool for scientists and may perform a beneficial role in pharmaceutical design and research academia.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Shahid Akbar
- Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China; Department of Computer Science, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, KP 23200, Pakistan
| | - Quan Zou
- Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China; Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Quzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Quzhou 324000, PR China.
| | - Ali Raza
- Department of Physical and Numerical Sciences, Qurtuba University of Science and Information Technology, Peshawar, KP 25124, Pakistan
| | - Fawaz Khaled Alarfaj
- Department of Management Information Systems (MIS), School of Business, King Faisal University (KFU), Al-Ahsa 31982, Saudi Arabia
| |
Collapse
|
4
|
Rusic D, Kumric M, Seselja Perisin A, Leskur D, Bukic J, Modun D, Vilovic M, Vrdoljak J, Martinovic D, Grahovac M, Bozic J. Tackling the Antimicrobial Resistance "Pandemic" with Machine Learning Tools: A Summary of Available Evidence. Microorganisms 2024; 12:842. [PMID: 38792673 PMCID: PMC11123121 DOI: 10.3390/microorganisms12050842] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/16/2024] [Revised: 04/16/2024] [Accepted: 04/19/2024] [Indexed: 05/26/2024] Open
Abstract
Antimicrobial resistance is recognised as one of the top threats healthcare is bound to face in the future. There have been various attempts to preserve the efficacy of existing antimicrobials, develop new and efficient antimicrobials, manage infections with multi-drug resistant strains, and improve patient outcomes, resulting in a growing mass of routinely available data, including electronic health records and microbiological information that can be employed to develop individualised antimicrobial stewardship. Machine learning methods have been developed to predict antimicrobial resistance from whole-genome sequencing data, forecast medication susceptibility, recognise epidemic patterns for surveillance purposes, or propose new antibacterial treatments and accelerate scientific discovery. Unfortunately, there is an evident gap between the number of machine learning applications in science and the effective implementation of these systems. This narrative review highlights some of the outstanding opportunities that machine learning offers when applied in research related to antimicrobial resistance. In the future, machine learning tools may prove to be superbugs' kryptonite. This review aims to provide an overview of available publications to aid researchers that are looking to expand their work with new approaches and to acquaint them with the current application of machine learning techniques in this field.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Doris Rusic
- Department of Pharmacy, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia; (D.R.); (A.S.P.); (D.L.); (J.B.); (D.M.)
| | - Marko Kumric
- Department of Pathophysiology, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia; (M.K.); (M.V.); (J.V.); (D.M.)
- Laboratory for Cardiometabolic Research, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia
| | - Ana Seselja Perisin
- Department of Pharmacy, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia; (D.R.); (A.S.P.); (D.L.); (J.B.); (D.M.)
| | - Dario Leskur
- Department of Pharmacy, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia; (D.R.); (A.S.P.); (D.L.); (J.B.); (D.M.)
| | - Josipa Bukic
- Department of Pharmacy, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia; (D.R.); (A.S.P.); (D.L.); (J.B.); (D.M.)
| | - Darko Modun
- Department of Pharmacy, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia; (D.R.); (A.S.P.); (D.L.); (J.B.); (D.M.)
| | - Marino Vilovic
- Department of Pathophysiology, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia; (M.K.); (M.V.); (J.V.); (D.M.)
- Laboratory for Cardiometabolic Research, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia
| | - Josip Vrdoljak
- Department of Pathophysiology, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia; (M.K.); (M.V.); (J.V.); (D.M.)
- Laboratory for Cardiometabolic Research, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia
| | - Dinko Martinovic
- Department of Pathophysiology, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia; (M.K.); (M.V.); (J.V.); (D.M.)
- Department of Maxillofacial Surgery, University Hospital of Split, Spinciceva 1, 21000 Split, Croatia
| | - Marko Grahovac
- Department of Pharmacology, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia;
| | - Josko Bozic
- Department of Pathophysiology, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia; (M.K.); (M.V.); (J.V.); (D.M.)
- Laboratory for Cardiometabolic Research, University of Split School of Medicine, Soltanska 2A, 21000 Split, Croatia
| |
Collapse
|
5
|
Xu J, Ruan X, Yang J, Hu B, Li S, Hu J. SME-MFP: A novel spatiotemporal neural network with multiangle initialization embedding toward multifunctional peptides prediction. Comput Biol Chem 2024; 109:108033. [PMID: 38412804 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiolchem.2024.108033] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 11/11/2023] [Revised: 01/09/2024] [Accepted: 02/17/2024] [Indexed: 02/29/2024]
Abstract
As a promising alternative to conventional antibiotic drugs in the biomedical field, functional peptide has been widely used in disease treatment owing to its low toxicity, high absorption rate, and biological activity. Recently, several machine learning methods have been developed for functional peptide prediction. However, the main research heavily relies on statistical features and few consider multifunctional peptide identification. So, we propose SME-MFP, a novel predictor in the imbalanced multi-label functional peptide datasets. First, we employ physicochemical and evolutionary information to represent the peptide sequence's initialization features from multiple perspectives. Second, the features are fused and then put into spatial feature extractors, where the residual connection and multiscale convolutional neural network extract more discriminative features of different lengths' peptide sequences. Besides, we also design AFT-based temporal feature extractors to fully capture the global interactions of the sequences. Finally, devising a new loss to replace the traditional cross entropy loss to settle the class imbalance problems. The results show that our framework not only enhances the model's ability to capture sequence features effectively, but also accuracy improves by 3.89% over existing methods on public peptide datasets.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Jing Xu
- State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data, Guizhou University, Guiyang 550025, China
| | - Xiaoli Ruan
- State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data, Guizhou University, Guiyang 550025, China.
| | - Jing Yang
- State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data, Guizhou University, Guiyang 550025, China
| | - Bingqi Hu
- State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data, Guizhou University, Guiyang 550025, China
| | - Shaobo Li
- State Key Laboratory of Public Big Data, Guizhou University, Guiyang 550025, China
| | - Jianjun Hu
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of South Carolina, Columbia 29208, USA
| |
Collapse
|
6
|
Lee B, Shin D. Contrastive learning for enhancing feature extraction in anticancer peptides. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae220. [PMID: 38725157 PMCID: PMC11082072 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae220] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/08/2024] [Revised: 03/28/2024] [Accepted: 04/21/2024] [Indexed: 05/13/2024] Open
Abstract
Cancer, recognized as a primary cause of death worldwide, has profound health implications and incurs a substantial social burden. Numerous efforts have been made to develop cancer treatments, among which anticancer peptides (ACPs) are garnering recognition for their potential applications. While ACP screening is time-consuming and costly, in silico prediction tools provide a way to overcome these challenges. Herein, we present a deep learning model designed to screen ACPs using peptide sequences only. A contrastive learning technique was applied to enhance model performance, yielding better results than a model trained solely on binary classification loss. Furthermore, two independent encoders were employed as a replacement for data augmentation, a technique commonly used in contrastive learning. Our model achieved superior performance on five of six benchmark datasets against previous state-of-the-art models. As prediction tools advance, the potential in peptide-based cancer therapeutics increases, promising a brighter future for oncology research and patient care.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Byungjo Lee
- Research Institute, National Cancer Center, 323, Ilsan-ro, Ilsandong-gu, Goyang, 10408, Republic of Korea
| | - Dongkwan Shin
- Research Institute, National Cancer Center, 323, Ilsan-ro, Ilsandong-gu, Goyang, 10408, Republic of Korea
- Department of Cancer Biomedical Science, National Cancer Center Graduate School of Cancer Science and Policy, 323, Ilsan-ro, Ilsandong-gu, Goyang, 10408, Republic of Korea
| |
Collapse
|
7
|
Hesamzadeh P, Seif A, Mahmoudzadeh K, Ganjali Koli M, Mostafazadeh A, Nayeri K, Mirjafary Z, Saeidian H. De novo antioxidant peptide design via machine learning and DFT studies. Sci Rep 2024; 14:6473. [PMID: 38499731 PMCID: PMC10948870 DOI: 10.1038/s41598-024-57247-z] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/29/2023] [Accepted: 03/15/2024] [Indexed: 03/20/2024] Open
Abstract
Antioxidant peptides (AOPs) are highly valued in food and pharmaceutical industries due to their significant role in human function. This study introduces a novel approach to identifying robust AOPs using a deep generative model based on sequence representation. Through filtration with a deep-learning classification model and subsequent clustering via the Butina cluster algorithm, twelve peptides (GP1-GP12) with potential antioxidant capacity were predicted. Density functional theory (DFT) calculations guided the selection of six peptides for synthesis and biological experiments. Molecular orbital representations revealed that the HOMO for these peptides is primarily localized on the indole segment, underscoring its pivotal role in antioxidant activity. All six synthesized peptides exhibited antioxidant activity in the DPPH assay, while the hydroxyl radical test showed suboptimal results. A hemolysis assay confirmed the non-hemolytic nature of the generated peptides. Additionally, an in silico investigation explored the potential inhibitory interaction between the peptides and the Keap1 protein. Analysis revealed that ligands GP3, GP4, and GP12 induced significant structural changes in proteins, affecting their stability and flexibility. These findings highlight the capability of machine learning approaches in generating novel antioxidant peptides.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Parsa Hesamzadeh
- Department of Chemistry, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
| | - Abdolvahab Seif
- Dipartimento di Fisica, Universita' di Padova, Via Marzolo 8, 35131, Padua, Italy
- Department of Chemistry, University of Turin, Via Pietro Giuria 7, 10125, Turin, Italy
| | - Kazem Mahmoudzadeh
- Department of Organic Chemistry and Oil, Faculty of Chemistry, Shahid Beheshti University, Tehran, Iran
| | | | - Amrollah Mostafazadeh
- Cellular and Molecular Biology Research Center, Health Research Institute, Babol University of Medical Sciences, Babol, Iran
| | - Kosar Nayeri
- Student Research Committee, Babol University of Medical Sciences, Babol, Iran
| | - Zohreh Mirjafary
- Department of Chemistry, Science and Research Branch, Islamic Azad University, Tehran, Iran
| | - Hamid Saeidian
- Department of Science, Payame Noor University (PNU), PO Box: 19395-4697, Tehran, Iran.
| |
Collapse
|
8
|
Xu K, Zhao X, Tan Y, Wu J, Cai Y, Zhou J, Wang X. A systematical review on antimicrobial peptides and their food applications. BIOMATERIALS ADVANCES 2023; 155:213684. [PMID: 37976831 DOI: 10.1016/j.bioadv.2023.213684] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/23/2023] [Revised: 10/29/2023] [Accepted: 11/02/2023] [Indexed: 11/19/2023]
Abstract
Food safety issues are a major concern in food processing and packaging industries. Food spoilage is caused by microbial contamination, where antimicrobial peptides (APs) provide solutions by eliminating microorganisms. APs such as nisin have been successfully and commonly used in food processing and preservation. Here, we discuss all aspects of the functionalization of APs in food applications. We briefly review the natural sources of APs and their native functions. Recombinant expression of APs in microorganisms and their yields are described. The molecular mechanisms of AP antibacterial action are explained, and this knowledge can further benefit the design of functional APs. We highlight current utilities and challenges for the application of APs in the food industry, and address rational methods for AP design that may overcome current limitations.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Kangjie Xu
- Engineering Research Center of Ministry of Education on Food Synthetic Biotechnology and School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China; Science Center for Future Foods, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China
| | - XinYi Zhao
- Engineering Research Center of Ministry of Education on Food Synthetic Biotechnology and School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China; Science Center for Future Foods, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China
| | - Yameng Tan
- Engineering Research Center of Ministry of Education on Food Synthetic Biotechnology and School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China; Science Center for Future Foods, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China
| | - Junheng Wu
- Engineering Research Center of Ministry of Education on Food Synthetic Biotechnology and School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China; Science Center for Future Foods, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China
| | - Yiqing Cai
- Engineering Research Center of Ministry of Education on Food Synthetic Biotechnology and School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China; Science Center for Future Foods, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China
| | - Jingwen Zhou
- Engineering Research Center of Ministry of Education on Food Synthetic Biotechnology and School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China; Science Center for Future Foods, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China; Jiangsu Province Engineering Research Center of Food Synthetic Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China..
| | - Xinglong Wang
- Engineering Research Center of Ministry of Education on Food Synthetic Biotechnology and School of Biotechnology, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China; Science Center for Future Foods, Jiangnan University, 1800 Lihu Road, Wuxi, Jiangsu 214122, China.
| |
Collapse
|
9
|
Szymczak P, Szczurek E. Artificial intelligence-driven antimicrobial peptide discovery. Curr Opin Struct Biol 2023; 83:102733. [PMID: 37992451 DOI: 10.1016/j.sbi.2023.102733] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/17/2023] [Revised: 10/06/2023] [Accepted: 10/30/2023] [Indexed: 11/24/2023]
Abstract
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) emerge as promising agents against antimicrobial resistance, providing an alternative to conventional antibiotics. Artificial intelligence (AI) revolutionized AMP discovery through both discrimination and generation approaches. The discriminators aid in the identification of promising candidates by predicting key peptide properties such as activity and toxicity, while the generators learn the distribution of peptides and enable sampling novel AMP candidates, either de novo or as analogs of a prototype peptide. Moreover, the controlled generation of AMPs with desired properties is achieved by discriminator-guided filtering, positive-only learning, latent space sampling, as well as conditional and optimized generation. Here we review recent achievements in AI-driven AMP discovery, highlighting the most exciting directions.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Paulina Szymczak
- Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics, University of Warsaw, Banacha 2, 02-097, Warsaw, Poland.
| | - Ewa Szczurek
- Faculty of Mathematics, Informatics and Mechanics, University of Warsaw, Banacha 2, 02-097, Warsaw, Poland.
| |
Collapse
|
10
|
Xing W, Zhang J, Li C, Huo Y, Dong G. iAMP-Attenpred: a novel antimicrobial peptide predictor based on BERT feature extraction method and CNN-BiLSTM-Attention combination model. Brief Bioinform 2023; 25:bbad443. [PMID: 38055840 PMCID: PMC10699745 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad443] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 09/08/2023] [Revised: 10/31/2023] [Accepted: 11/11/2023] [Indexed: 12/08/2023] Open
Abstract
As a kind of small molecule protein that can fight against various microorganisms in nature, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) play an indispensable role in maintaining the health of organisms and fortifying defenses against diseases. Nevertheless, experimental approaches for AMP identification still demand substantial allocation of human resources and material inputs. Alternatively, computing approaches can assist researchers effectively and promptly predict AMPs. In this study, we present a novel AMP predictor called iAMP-Attenpred. As far as we know, this is the first work that not only employs the popular BERT model in the field of natural language processing (NLP) for AMPs feature encoding, but also utilizes the idea of combining multiple models to discover AMPs. Firstly, we treat each amino acid from preprocessed AMPs and non-AMP sequences as a word, and then input it into BERT pre-training model for feature extraction. Moreover, the features obtained from BERT method are fed to a composite model composed of one-dimensional CNN, BiLSTM and attention mechanism for better discriminating features. Finally, a flatten layer and various fully connected layers are utilized for the final classification of AMPs. Experimental results reveal that, compared with the existing predictors, our iAMP-Attenpred predictor achieves better performance indicators, such as accuracy, precision and so on. This further demonstrates that using the BERT approach to capture effective feature information of peptide sequences and combining multiple deep learning models are effective and meaningful for predicting AMPs.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Wenxuan Xing
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, No.195 Chuangxin Road, Hunnan District, Shenyang 110170, China
| | - Jie Zhang
- College of Computer and Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, No.29 Erdos East Street, Saihan District, Hohhot 010011, China
| | - Chen Li
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, No.195 Chuangxin Road, Hunnan District, Shenyang 110170, China
| | - Yujia Huo
- College of Computer and Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, No.29 Erdos East Street, Saihan District, Hohhot 010011, China
| | - Gaifang Dong
- College of Computer and Information Engineering, Inner Mongolia Agricultural University, No.29 Erdos East Street, Saihan District, Hohhot 010011, China
| |
Collapse
|
11
|
Raza A, Uddin J, Almuhaimeed A, Akbar S, Zou Q, Ahmad A. AIPs-SnTCN: Predicting Anti-Inflammatory Peptides Using fastText and Transformer Encoder-Based Hybrid Word Embedding with Self-Normalized Temporal Convolutional Networks. J Chem Inf Model 2023; 63:6537-6554. [PMID: 37905969 DOI: 10.1021/acs.jcim.3c01563] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 8.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/02/2023]
Abstract
Inflammation is a biologically resistant response to harmful stimuli, such as infection, damaged cells, toxic chemicals, or tissue injuries. Its purpose is to eradicate pathogenic micro-organisms or irritants and facilitate tissue repair. Prolonged inflammation can result in chronic inflammatory diseases. However, wet-laboratory-based treatments are costly and time-consuming and may have adverse side effects on normal cells. In the past decade, peptide therapeutics have gained significant attention due to their high specificity in targeting affected cells without affecting healthy cells. Motivated by the significance of peptide-based therapies, we developed a highly discriminative prediction model called AIPs-SnTCN to predict anti-inflammatory peptides accurately. The peptide samples are encoded using word embedding techniques such as skip-gram and attention-based bidirectional encoder representation using a transformer (BERT). The conjoint triad feature (CTF) also collects structure-based cluster profile features. The fused vector of word embedding and sequential features is formed to compensate for the limitations of single encoding methods. Support vector machine-based recursive feature elimination (SVM-RFE) is applied to choose the ranking-based optimal space. The optimized feature space is trained by using an improved self-normalized temporal convolutional network (SnTCN). The AIPs-SnTCN model achieved a predictive accuracy of 95.86% and an AUC of 0.97 by using training samples. In the case of the alternate training data set, our model obtained an accuracy of 92.04% and an AUC of 0.96. The proposed AIPs-SnTCN model outperformed existing models with an ∼19% higher accuracy and an ∼14% higher AUC value. The reliability and efficacy of our AIPs-SnTCN model make it a valuable tool for scientists and may play a beneficial role in pharmaceutical design and research academia.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Ali Raza
- Department of Physical and Numerical Sciences, Qurtuba University of Science and Information Technology, Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 25124, Pakistan
- Department of Computer Science, MY University, Islamabad 45750, Pakistan
| | - Jamal Uddin
- Department of Physical and Numerical Sciences, Qurtuba University of Science and Information Technology, Peshawar, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 25124, Pakistan
| | - Abdullah Almuhaimeed
- Digital Health Institute, King Abdulaziz City for Science and Technology, Riyadh 11442, Saudi Arabia
| | - Shahid Akbar
- Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China
- Department of Computer Science, Abdul Wali Khan University Mardan, Mardan, Khyber Pakhtunkhwa 23200, Pakistan
| | - Quan Zou
- Institute of Fundamental and Frontier Sciences, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China
- Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Quzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Quzhou 324000, PR China
| | - Ashfaq Ahmad
- Department of Computer Science, MY University, Islamabad 45750, Pakistan
| |
Collapse
|
12
|
Zhang J, Yan W, Zhang Q, Li Z, Liang L, Zuo M, Zhang Y. Umami-BERT: An interpretable BERT-based model for umami peptides prediction. Food Res Int 2023; 172:113142. [PMID: 37689906 DOI: 10.1016/j.foodres.2023.113142] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/04/2023] [Revised: 06/12/2023] [Accepted: 06/13/2023] [Indexed: 09/11/2023]
Abstract
Umami peptides have received extensive attention due to their ability to enhance flavors and provide nutritional benefits. The increasing demand for novel umami peptides and the vast number of peptides present in food call for more efficient methods to screen umami peptides, and further exploration is necessary. Therefore, the purpose of this study is to develop deep learning (DL) model to realize rapid screening of umami peptides. The Umami-BERT model was devised utilizing a novel two-stage training strategy with Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers (BERT) and the inception network. In the pre-training stage, attention mechanisms were implemented on a large amount of bioactive peptides sequences to acquire high-dimensional generalized features. In the re-training stage, umami peptide prediction was carried out on UMP789 dataset, which is developed through the latest research. The model achieved the performance with an accuracy (ACC) of 93.23% and MCC of 0.78 on the balanced dataset, as well as an ACC of 95.00% and MCC of 0.85 on the unbalanced dataset. The results demonstrated that Umami-BERT could predict umami peptides directly from their amino acid sequences and exceeded the performance of other models. Furthermore, Umami-BERT enabled the analysis of attention pattern learned by Umami-BERT model. The amino acids Alanine (A), Cysteine (C), Aspartate (D), and Glutamicacid (E) were found to be the most significant contributors to umami peptides. Additionally, the patterns of summarized umami peptides involving A, C, D, and E were analyzed based on the learned attention weights. Consequently, Umami-BERT exhibited great potential in the large-scale screening of candidate peptides and offers novel insight for the further exploration of umami peptides.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Jingcheng Zhang
- Food Laboratory of Zhongyuan, Beijing Technology and Business University, No. 11/33, Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China; Key Laboratory of Flavor Science of China Gengeral Chamber of Commerce, Beijing Technology and Business University, No. 11/33, Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China.
| | - Wenjing Yan
- National Engineering Research Centre for Agri-product Quality Traceability, Beijing Technology and Business University, No. 11/33, Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China.
| | - Qingchuan Zhang
- National Engineering Research Centre for Agri-product Quality Traceability, Beijing Technology and Business University, No. 11/33, Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China.
| | - Zihan Li
- National Engineering Research Centre for Agri-product Quality Traceability, Beijing Technology and Business University, No. 11/33, Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China.
| | - Li Liang
- Food Laboratory of Zhongyuan, Beijing Technology and Business University, No. 11/33, Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China; Key Laboratory of Flavor Science of China Gengeral Chamber of Commerce, Beijing Technology and Business University, No. 11/33, Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China.
| | - Min Zuo
- National Engineering Research Centre for Agri-product Quality Traceability, Beijing Technology and Business University, No. 11/33, Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China.
| | - Yuyu Zhang
- Food Laboratory of Zhongyuan, Beijing Technology and Business University, No. 11/33, Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China; Key Laboratory of Flavor Science of China Gengeral Chamber of Commerce, Beijing Technology and Business University, No. 11/33, Fucheng Road, Haidian District, Beijing 100048, China.
| |
Collapse
|
13
|
Zhang W, Xu Y, Wang A, Chen G, Zhao J. Fuse feeds as one: cross-modal framework for general identification of AMPs. Brief Bioinform 2023; 24:bbad336. [PMID: 37779248 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad336] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/10/2023] [Revised: 09/05/2023] [Accepted: 09/06/2023] [Indexed: 10/03/2023] Open
Abstract
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) are promising candidates for the development of new antibiotics due to their broad-spectrum activity against a range of pathogens. However, identifying AMPs through a huge bunch of candidates is challenging due to their complex structures and diverse sequences. In this study, we propose SenseXAMP, a cross-modal framework that leverages semantic embeddings of and protein descriptors (PDs) of input sequences to improve the identification performance of AMPs. SenseXAMP includes a multi-input alignment module and cross-representation fusion module to explore the hidden information between the two input features and better leverage the fusion feature. To better address the AMPs identification task, we accumulate the latest annotated AMPs data to form more generous benchmark datasets. Additionally, we expand the existing AMPs identification task settings by adding an AMPs regression task to meet more specific requirements like antimicrobial activity prediction. The experimental results indicated that SenseXAMP outperformed existing state-of-the-art models on multiple AMP-related datasets including commonly used AMPs classification datasets and our proposed benchmark datasets. Furthermore, we conducted a series of experiments to demonstrate the complementary nature of traditional PDs and protein pre-training models in AMPs tasks. Our experiments reveal that SenseXAMP can effectively combine the advantages of PDs to improve the performance of protein pre-training models in AMPs tasks.
Collapse
Affiliation(s)
- Wentao Zhang
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, 310027, Hangzhou,Zhejiang, P.R.China
| | - Yanchao Xu
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, 310027, Hangzhou,Zhejiang, P.R.China
| | - Aowen Wang
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, 310027, Hangzhou,Zhejiang, P.R.China
| | - Gang Chen
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, 310027, Hangzhou,Zhejiang, P.R.China
| | - Junbo Zhao
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Zhejiang University, 38 Zheda Road, 310027, Hangzhou,Zhejiang, P.R.China
| |
Collapse
|