Classifying alkaliphilic proteins using embeddings from protein language model.

Alkaliphilic proteins have great potential as biocatalysts in biotechnology, especially for enzyme engineering. Extensive research has focused on exploring the enzymatic potential of alkaliphiles and characterizing alkaliphilic proteins. However, the current method employed for identifying these proteins that requires web lab experiment is time-consuming, labor-intensive, and expensive. Therefore, the development of a computational method for alkaliphilic protein identification would be invaluable for protein engineering and design. In this study, we present a novel approach that uses embeddings from a protein language model called ESM-2(3B) in a deep learning framework to classify alkaliphilic and non-alkaliphilic proteins. To our knowledge, this is the first attempt to employ embeddings from a pre-trained protein language model to classify alkaliphilic protein. A reliable dataset comprising 1,002 alkaliphilic and 1,866 non-alkaliphilic proteins was constructed for training and testing the proposed model. The proposed model, dubbed ALPACA, achieves performance scores of 0.88, 0.84, and 0.75 for accuracy, f1-score, and Matthew correlation coefficient respectively on independent dataset. ALPACA is likely to serve as a valuable resource for exploring protein alkalinity and its role in protein design and engineering.

BiCaps-DBP: Predicting DNA-binding proteins from protein sequences using Bi-LSTM and a 1D-capsule network.

Predicting DNA-binding proteins (DBPs) based solely on primary sequences is one of the most challenging problems in genome annotation. DBPs play a crucial role in various biological processes, including DNA replication, transcription, repair, and splicing. Some DBPs are essential in pharmaceutical research on various human cancers and autoimmune diseases. Existing experimental methods for identifying DBPs are time-consuming and costly. Therefore, developing a rapid and accurate computational technique is necessary to address the issue. This study introduces BiCaps-DBP, a deep learning-based method that improves DBP prediction performance by combining bidirectional long short-term memory with a 1D-capsule network. This study uses three training and independent datasets to evaluate the proposed model's generalizability and robustness. Based on three independent datasets, BiCaps-DBP achieved 1.05%, 5.79% and 0.40% higher accuracies than an existing predictor for PDB2272, PDB186 and PDB20000, respectively. These outcomes indicate that the proposed method is a promising DBP predictor.