iACP-GE: accurate identification of anticancer peptides by using gradient boosting decision tree and extra tree

pACP-HybDeep: predicting anticancer peptides using binary tree growth based transformer and structural feature encoding with deep-hybrid learning

Worldwide, Cancer remains a significant health concern due to its high mortality rates. Despite numerous traditional therapies and wet-laboratory methods for treating cancer-affected cells, these approaches often face limitations, including high costs and substantial side effects. Recently the high selectivity of peptides has garnered significant attention from scientists due to their reliable targeted actions and minimal adverse effects. Furthermore, keeping the significant outcomes of the existing computational models, we propose a highly reliable and effective model namely, pACP-HybDeep for the accurate prediction of anticancer peptides. In this model, training peptides are numerically encoded using an attention-based ProtBERT-BFD encoder to extract semantic features along with CTDT-based structural information. Furthermore, a k-nearest neighbor-based binary tree growth (BTG) algorithm is employed to select an optimal feature set from the multi-perspective vector. The selected feature vector is subsequently trained using a CNN + RNN-based deep learning model. Our proposed pACP-HybDeep model demonstrated a high training accuracy of 95.33%, and an AUC of 0.97. To validate the generalization capabilities of the model, our pACP-HybDeep model achieved accuracies of 94.92%, 92.26%, and 91.16% on independent datasets Ind-S1, Ind-S2, and Ind-S3, respectively. The demonstrated efficacy, and reliability of the pACP-HybDeep model using test datasets establish it as a valuable tool for researchers in academia and pharmaceutical drug design.

ACP-CapsPred: an explainable computational framework for identification and functional prediction of anticancer peptides based on capsule network

Cancer is a severe illness that significantly threatens human life and health. Anticancer peptides (ACPs) represent a promising therapeutic strategy for combating cancer. In silico methods enable rapid and accurate identification of ACPs without extensive human and material resources. This study proposes a two-stage computational framework called ACP-CapsPred, which can accurately identify ACPs and characterize their functional activities across different cancer types. ACP-CapsPred integrates a protein language model with evolutionary information and physicochemical properties of peptides, constructing a comprehensive profile of peptides. ACP-CapsPred employs a next-generation neural network, specifically capsule networks, to construct predictive models. Experimental results demonstrate that ACP-CapsPred exhibits satisfactory predictive capabilities in both stages, reaching state-of-the-art performance. In the first stage, ACP-CapsPred achieves accuracies of 80.25% and 95.71%, as well as F1-scores of 79.86% and 95.90%, on benchmark datasets Set 1 and Set 2, respectively. In the second stage, tasked with characterizing the functional activities of ACPs across five selected cancer types, ACP-CapsPred attains an average accuracy of 90.75% and an F1-score of 91.38%. Furthermore, ACP-CapsPred demonstrates excellent interpretability, revealing regions and residues associated with anticancer activity. Consequently, ACP-CapsPred presents a promising solution to expedite the development of ACPs and offers a novel perspective for other biological sequence analyses.

CAPTURE: Comprehensive anti-cancer peptide predictor with a unique amino acid sequence encoder

Anticancer peptides (ACPs) key properties including bioactivity, high efficacy, low toxicity, and lack of drug resistance make them ideal candidates for cancer therapies. To deeply explore the potential of ACPs and accelerate development of cancer therapies, although 53 Artificial Intelligence supported computational predictors have been developed for ACPs and non ACPs classification but only one predictor has been developed for ACPs functional types annotations. Moreover, these predictors extract amino acids distribution patterns to transform peptides sequences into statistical vectors that are further fed to classifiers for discriminating peptides sequences and annotating peptides functional classes. Overall, these predictors remain fail in extracting diverse types of amino acids distribution patterns from peptide sequences. The paper in hand presents a unique CARE encoder that transforms peptides sequences into statistical vectors by extracting 4 different types of distribution patterns including correlation, distribution, composition, and transition. Across public benchmark dataset, proposed encoder potential is explored under two different evaluation settings namely; intrinsic and extrinsic. Extrinsic evaluation indicates that 12 different machine learning classifiers achieve superior performance with the proposed encoder as compared to 55 existing encoders. Furthermore, an intrinsic evaluation reveals that, unlike existing encoders, the proposed encoder generates more discriminative clusters for ACPs and non-ACPs classes. Across 8 public benchmark ACPs and non-ACPs classification datasets, proposed encoder and Adaboost classifier based CAPTURE predictor outperforms existing predictors with an average accuracy, recall and MCC score of 1%, 4%, and 2% respectively. In generalizeability evaluation case study, across 7 benchmark anti-microbial peptides classification datasets, CAPTURE surpasses existing predictors by an average AU-ROC of 2%. CAPTURE predictive pipeline along with label powerset method outperforms state-of-the-art ACPs functional types predictor by 5%, 5%, 5%, 6%, and 3% in terms of average accuracy, subset accuracy, precision, recall, and F1 respectively. CAPTURE web application is available at https://sds_genetic_analysis.opendfki.de/CAPTURE.

ANNprob-ACPs: A novel anticancer peptide identifier based on probabilistic feature fusion approach

Anticancer Peptides (ACPs) offer significant potential as cancer treatment drugs in this modern era. Quickly identifying active compounds from protein sequences is crucial for healthcare and cancer treatment. In this paper ANNprob-ACPs, a novel and effective model for detecting ACPs has been implemented based on nine feature encoding techniques, including AAC, CC, W2V, DPC, PAAC, QSO, CTDC, CTDT, and CKSAAGP. After analyzing the performance of several machine learning models, the six best models were selected based on their overall performances in every evaluation metric. The probability scores of each model were subsequently aggregated and used as input of our meta- model, called ANNprob-ACPs. Our model outperformed all others and its potential to lead to phenomenal identification of ACPs. The results of this study showed notable improvement in 10-fold cross-validation and independent test, with accuracy of 93.72% and 90.62%, respectively. Our proposed model, ANNprob-ACPs outperformed existing approaches in terms of accuracy and effectiveness in discovering ACPs. By using SHAP, this study obtained the physicochemical properties of QSO, and compositional properties of DPC, AAC, and PAAC are more impactful for our model's performances, which have a major impact on a drug's interactions and future discoveries. Consequently, this model is crucial for the future and has a high probability of detecting ACPs more frequently. We developed a web server of ANNprob-ACPs, which is accessible at ANNprob-ACPs webserver.

StackTHPred: Identifying Tumor-Homing Peptides through GBDT-Based Feature Selection with Stacking Ensemble Architecture

One of the major challenges in cancer therapy lies in the limited targeting specificity exhibited by existing anti-cancer drugs. Tumor-homing peptides (THPs) have emerged as a promising solution to this issue, due to their capability to specifically bind to and accumulate in tumor tissues while minimally impacting healthy tissues. THPs are short oligopeptides that offer a superior biological safety profile, with minimal antigenicity, and faster incorporation rates into target cells/tissues. However, identifying THPs experimentally, using methods such as phage display or in vivo screening, is a complex, time-consuming task, hence the need for computational methods. In this study, we proposed StackTHPred, a novel machine learning-based framework that predicts THPs using optimal features and a stacking architecture. With an effective feature selection algorithm and three tree-based machine learning algorithms, StackTHPred has demonstrated advanced performance, surpassing existing THP prediction methods. It achieved an accuracy of 0.915 and a 0.831 Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) score on the main dataset, and an accuracy of 0.883 and a 0.767 MCC score on the small dataset. StackTHPred also offers favorable interpretability, enabling researchers to better understand the intrinsic characteristics of THPs. Overall, StackTHPred is beneficial for both the exploration and identification of THPs and facilitates the development of innovative cancer therapies.

Accelerating the Discovery of Anticancer Peptides through Deep Forest Architecture with Deep Graphical Representation

Cancer is one of the leading diseases threatening human life and health worldwide. Peptide-based therapies have attracted much attention in recent years. Therefore, the precise prediction of anticancer peptides (ACPs) is crucial for discovering and designing novel cancer treatments. In this study, we proposed a novel machine learning framework (GRDF) that incorporates deep graphical representation and deep forest architecture for identifying ACPs. Specifically, GRDF extracts graphical features based on the physicochemical properties of peptides and integrates their evolutionary information along with binary profiles for constructing models. Moreover, we employ the deep forest algorithm, which adopts a layer-by-layer cascade architecture similar to deep neural networks, enabling excellent performance on small datasets but without complicated tuning of hyperparameters. The experiment shows GRDF exhibits state-of-the-art performance on two elaborate datasets (Set 1 and Set 2), achieving 77.12% accuracy and 77.54% F1-score on Set 1, as well as 94.10% accuracy and 94.15% F1-score on Set 2, exceeding existing ACP prediction methods. Our models exhibit greater robustness than the baseline algorithms commonly used for other sequence analysis tasks. In addition, GRDF is well-interpretable, enabling researchers to better understand the features of peptide sequences. The promising results demonstrate that GRDF is remarkably effective in identifying ACPs. Therefore, the framework presented in this study could assist researchers in facilitating the discovery of anticancer peptides and contribute to developing novel cancer treatments.