ABPCaps: A Novel Capsule Network-Based Method for the Prediction of Antibacterial Peptides

Abstract

The emergence of drug resistance among pathogens has become a major challenge to human health on a global scale. Among them, antibiotic resistance is already a critical issue, and finding new therapeutic agents to address this problem is therefore urgent. One of the most promising alternatives to antibiotics are antibacterial peptides (ABPs), i.e., short peptides with antibacterial activity. In this study, we propose a novel ABP recognition method, called ABPCaps. It integrates a convolutional neural network (CNN), a long short-term memory (LSTM), and a new type of neural network named the capsule network. The capsule network can extract critical features automatically from both positive and negative samples, leading to superior performance of ABPCaps over all baseline models built on hand-crafted peptide descriptors. Evaluated on independent test sets, ABPCaps achieves an accuracy of 93.33% and an F1-score of 91.34%, and consistently outperforms the baseline models in other extensive experiments as well. Our study demonstrates that the proposed ABPCaps, built on the capsule network method, is a valuable addition to the current state-of-the-art in the field of ABP recognition and has significant potential for further development.