iAMP-CA2L: a new CNN-BiLSTM-SVM classifier based on cellular automata image for identifying antimicrobial peptides and their functional types

Predicting antimicrobial peptides (AMPs') function is an important and difficult problem, particularly when AMPs have many multiplex functions, i.e. some AMPs simultaneously have two or three functional classes. By introducing the 'CNN-BiLSTM-SVM classifier' and 'cellular automata image', a new predictor, called iAMP-CA2L, has been developed that can be used to deal with the systems containing both monofunctional and multifunctional AMPs. iAMP-CA2L is a 2-level predictor. The 1st level is to identify whether a given query peptide is an AMP or a non-AMP, while the 2nd level is to predict if it belongs to one or more functional types. As demonstration, the jackknife cross-validation was performed with iAMP-CA2L on a benchmark dataset of AMPs classified into the following 10 functional classes: (1) antibacterial peptides, (2) antiviral peptides, (3) antifungal peptides, (4) antibiofilm peptides, (5) antiparasital peptides, (6) anti-HIV peptides, (7) anticancer (antitumor) peptides, (8) chemotactic peptides, (9) anti-MRSA peptides and (10) antiendotoxin peptides, where none of AMPs included has >= 90% pairwise sequence identity to any other in the same subset. Experiments show that iAMP-CA2L has greatly improved the prediction performance compared with the existing predictors. iAMP-CA2L is freely accessible to the public at the web site http://www.jci-bioinfo.cn/ iAMP-CA2L, and the predictor program has been uploaded to https://github.com/liujin66/iAMP-CA2L.

Automated summary

Predicting the function of antimicrobial peptides is crucial but challenging. The new predictor iAMP-CA2L uses a two-level approach to classify both monofunctional and multifunctional AMPs, showing significantly improved prediction performance compared to existing methods. The predictor is freely available online and has been uploaded to GitHub for public access.