DeepAVP: A Dual-Channel Deep Neural Network for Identifying Variable-Length Antiviral Peptides

Antiviral peptides (AVPs) have been experimentally verified to block virus into host cells, which have antiviral activity with decapeptide amide. Therefore, utilization of experimentally validated antiviral peptides is a potential alternative strategy for targeting medically important viruses. In this article, we propose a dual-channel deep neural network ensemble method for analyzing variable-length antiviral peptides. The LSTM channel can capture long-term dependencies for effectively studying original variable-length sequence data. The CONV channel can build dynamic neural network for analyzing the local evolution information. Also, our model can fine-tune the substitution matrix for specifically functional peptides. Applying it to a novel experimentally verified dataset, our AVPs predictor, DeepAVP, demonstrates state-of-the-art performance of 92.4% accuracy and 0.85 MCC, which is far better than existing prediction methods for identifying antiviral peptides. Therefore, DeepAVP, web server for predicting the effective AVPs, would make significantly contributions to peptide-based antiviral research.