dbAMP 2.0: updated resource for antimicrobial peptides with an enhanced scanning method for genomic and proteomic data.

The last 18 months, or more, have seen a profound shift in our global experience, with many of us navigating a once-in-100-year pandemic. To date, COVID-19 remains a life-threatening pandemic with little to no targeted therapeutic recourse. The discovery of novel antiviral agents, such as vaccines and drugs, can provide therapeutic solutions to save human beings from severe infections; however, there is no specifically effective antiviral treatment confirmed for now. Thus, great attention has been paid to the use of natural or artificial antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) as these compounds are widely regarded as promising solutions for the treatment of harmful microorganisms. Given the biological significance of AMPs, it was obvious that there was a significant need for a single platform for identifying and engaging with AMP data. This led to the creation of the dbAMP platform that provides comprehensive information about AMPs and facilitates their investigation and analysis. To date, the dbAMP has accumulated 26 447 AMPs and 2262 antimicrobial proteins from 3044 organisms using both database integration and manual curation of >4579 articles. In addition, dbAMP facilitates the evaluation of AMP structures using I-TASSER for automated protein structure prediction and structure-based functional annotation, providing predictive structure information for clinical drug development. Next-generation sequencing (NGS) and third-generation sequencing have been applied to generate large-scale sequencing reads from various environments, enabling greatly improved analysis of genome structure. In this update, we launch an efficient online tool that can effectively identify AMPs from genome/metagenome and proteome data of all species in a short period. In conclusion, these improvements promote the dbAMP as one of the most abundant and comprehensively annotated resources for AMPs. The updated dbAMP is now freely accessible at http://awi.cuhk.edu.cn/dbAMP.

Correction: A COVID-19 Pandemic Artificial Intelligence-Based System With Deep Learning Forecasting and Automatic Statistical Data Acquisition: Development and Implementation Study.

[This corrects the article DOI: 10.2196/27806.].

A COVID-19 Pandemic Artificial Intelligence-Based System With Deep Learning Forecasting and Automatic Statistical Data Acquisition: Development and Implementation Study.

BACKGROUND: More than 79.2 million confirmed COVID-19 cases and 1.7 million deaths were caused by SARS-CoV-2; the disease was named COVID-19 by the World Health Organization. Control of the COVID-19 epidemic has become a crucial issue around the globe, but there are limited studies that investigate the global trend of the COVID-19 pandemic together with each country's policy measures. OBJECTIVE: We aimed to develop an online artificial intelligence (AI) system to analyze the dynamic trend of the COVID-19 pandemic, facilitate forecasting and predictive modeling, and produce a heat map visualization of policy measures in 171 countries. METHODS: The COVID-19 Pandemic AI System (CPAIS) integrated two data sets: the data set from the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker from the Blavatnik School of Government, which is maintained by the University of Oxford, and the data set from the COVID-19 Data Repository, which was established by the Johns Hopkins University Center for Systems Science and Engineering. This study utilized four statistical and deep learning techniques for forecasting: autoregressive integrated moving average (ARIMA), feedforward neural network (FNN), multilayer perceptron (MLP) neural network, and long short-term memory (LSTM). With regard to 1-year records (ie, whole time series data), records from the last 14 days served as the validation set to evaluate the performance of the forecast, whereas earlier records served as the training set. RESULTS: A total of 171 countries that featured in both databases were included in the online system. The CPAIS was developed to explore variations, trends, and forecasts related to the COVID-19 pandemic across several counties. For instance, the number of confirmed monthly cases in the United States reached a local peak in July 2020 and another peak of 6,368,591 in December 2020. A dynamic heat map with policy measures depicts changes in COVID-19 measures for each country. A total of 19 measures were embedded within the three sections presented on the website, and only 4 of the 19 measures were continuous measures related to financial support or investment. Deep learning models were used to enable COVID-19 forecasting; the performances of ARIMA, FNN, and the MLP neural network were not stable because their forecast accuracy was only better than LSTM for a few countries. LSTM demonstrated the best forecast accuracy for Canada, as the root mean square error (RMSE), mean absolute error (MAE), and mean absolute percentage error (MAPE) were 2272.551, 1501.248, and 0.2723075, respectively. ARIMA (RMSE=317.53169; MAPE=0.4641688) and FNN (RMSE=181.29894; MAPE=0.2708482) demonstrated better performance for South Korea. CONCLUSIONS: The CPAIS collects and summarizes information about the COVID-19 pandemic and offers data visualization and deep learning-based prediction. It might be a useful reference for predicting a serious outbreak or epidemic. Moreover, the system undergoes daily updates and includes the latest information on vaccination, which may change the dynamics of the pandemic.