CAMP: a Convolutional Attention-based Neural Network for Multifaceted Peptide-protein Interaction Prediction

Peptide-protein interactions (PepPIs) are involved in various fundamental cellular functions and their identification is crucial for designing efficacious peptide therapeutics. To facilitate the peptide drug discovery process, a number of computational methods have been developed to predict peptide-protein interactions. However, most of the existing prediction approaches heavily depend on high-resolution structure data. Although several deep-learning-based frameworks have been proposed to predict compound-protein interactions or protein-protein interactions, few of them are particularly designed to specifically predict peptide-protein interactions. In this paper, We present a sequence-based Convolutional Attention-based neural network for Multifaceted prediction of Peptide-protein interactions, called CAMP, including predicting binary peptide-protein interactions and corresponding binding residues in the peptides. We also construct a benchmark dataset containing high-quality peptide-protein interaction pairs with the corresponding peptide binding residues for model training and evaluation. CAMP incorporates convolution neural network architectures and attention mechanism to fully exploit informative sequence-based features, including secondary structures, physicochemical properties, intrinsic disorder features and position-specific scoring matrix of the protein. Systematical evaluation of our benchmark dataset demonstrates that CAMP outperforms the state-of-the-art baseline methods on binary peptide-protein interaction prediction. In addition, CAMP can successfully identify the binding residues involved non-covalent interactions for peptides. These results indicate that CAMP can serve as a useful tool in peptide-protein interaction prediction and peptide binding site identification, which can thus greatly facilitate the peptide drug discovery process. The source code of CAMP can be found in https://github.com/twopin/CAMP.