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.

AVPIden: a new scheme for identification and functional prediction of antiviral peptides based on machine learning approaches.

Antiviral peptide (AVP) is a kind of antimicrobial peptide (AMP) that has the potential ability to fight against virus infection. Machine learning-based prediction with a computational biology approach can facilitate the development of the novel therapeutic agents. In this study, we proposed a double-stage classification scheme, named AVPIden, for predicting the AVPs and their functional activities against different viruses. The first stage is to distinguish the AVP from a broad-spectrum peptide collection, including not only the regular peptides (non-AMP) but also the AMPs without antiviral functions (non-AVP). The second stage is responsible for characterizing one or more virus families or species that the AVP targets. Imbalanced learning is utilized to improve the performance of prediction. The AVPIden uses multiple descriptors to precisely demonstrate the peptide properties and adopts explainable machine learning strategies based on Shapley value to exploit how the descriptors impact the antiviral activities. Finally, the evaluation performance of the proposed model suggests its ability to predict the antivirus activities and their potential functions against six virus families (Coronaviridae, Retroviridae, Herpesviridae, Paramyxoviridae, Orthomyxoviridae, Flaviviridae) and eight kinds of virus (FIV, HCV, HIV, HPIV3, HSV1, INFVA, RSV, SARS-CoV). The AVPIden gives an option for reinforcing the development of AVPs with the computer-aided method and has been deployed at http://awi.cuhk.edu.cn/AVPIden/.