Enhancing Vaxign-DL for Vaccine Candidate Prediction with added ESM-Generated Features

Many vaccine design programs have been developed, including our own machine learning approaches Vaxign-ML and Vaxign-DL. Using deep learning techniques, Vaxign-DL predicts bacterial protective antigens by calculating 509 biological and biomedical features from protein sequences. In this study, we first used the protein folding ESM program to calculate a set of 1,280 features from individual protein sequences, and then utilized the new set of features separately or in combination with the traditional set of 509 features to predict protective antigens. Our result showed that the usage of ESM-derived features alone was able to accurately predict vaccine antigens with a performance similar to the orginal Vaxign-DL prediction method, and the usage of the combined ESM-derived and orginal Vaxign-DL features significantly improved the prediction performance according to a set of seven scores including specificity, sensitivity, and AUROC. To further evaluate the updated methods, we conducted a Leave-One-Pathogen-Out Validation (LOPOV) study, and found that the usage of ESM-derived features significantly improved the the prediction of vaccine antigens from 10 bacterial pathogens. This research is the first reported study demonstrating the added value of protein folding features for vaccine antigen prediction.