TriStack enables accurate identification of antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory peptides by combining machine learning and deep learning approaches

Abstract

The identification of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and anti-inflammatory peptides (AIPs) is crucial for drug design and disease treatment. However, it remains a computational challenge to accurately identify these peptides due to insufficient information encoding the peptide sequences. In this study, we propose TriStack, a powerful and interpretable model for accurate identification of AMPs and AIPs by stacking a machine learning-based module using a multi-layer residual network. It first extracts three types of function-related features from peptide sequences to comprehensively characterize the composition, distribution, and physicochemical properties of residues. Furthermore, these features are fused and fed into a two-module stacked model. The first module provides the preliminary predictions based on three machine learning methods, while the second module refines these predictions further via a multi-layer residual network. After training and testing, TriStack outperforms all the compared leading methods for both AMPs and AIPs predictions. TriStack is expected to contribute to antimicrobial and anti-inflammatory drug based on peptide sequences.