Decoding antibiotic modes of action from multimodal cellular responses

Abstract

Antibiotic resistance continues to rise, yet most new drug candidates act through long-established targets. Faster mode of action (MoA) assessment would enable more effective prioritization of screening hits and help identify compounds with novel mechanisms. In this study, we aimed to develop a scalable framework for MoA inference from antibiotic-induced cellular response profiles in Escherichia coli. We generated a multimodal dataset spanning more than 50 antibiotics, including proteome profiles, chemical structure descriptors, inhibitory concentrations and growth dynamics, and used it to build MAPPER (Mode of Action Prediction via Proteomics-Enhanced Representation), a framework comprising a fixed multimodal predictor and an uncertainty module. MAPPER accurately classified antibiotics across nine mechanistic classes, flagged compounds with likely novel mechanisms and retained predictive power in proteomics-only transfer experiments across mass spectrometry platforms and external data. Together, these results establish MAPPER as an innovative tool for MoA prediction and novelty detection, enabling prioritization of antibacterial candidates with distinct mechanisms.