Yan Hu1, Ziqiang Wang2, Hailin Hu3, Fangping Wan4, Lin Chen5, Yuanpeng Xiong6,7, Xiaoxia Wang2, Dan Zhao4, Weiren Huang2, Jianyang Zeng4,8. 1. School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. 2. Department of Urology, Shenzhen Second People's Hospital, The First Affiliated Hospital of Shenzhen University, International Cancer Center, Shenzhen University School of Medicine, Shenzhen, China. 3. School of Medicine, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. 4. Institute for Interdisciplinary Information Sciences, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. 5. Turing AI Institute of Nanjing, Nanjing, China. 6. Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. 7. Bioinformatics Division, BNRIST/Department of Computer Science and Technology, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China. 8. MOE Key Laboratory of Bioinformatics, Tsinghua University, Beijing, China.
Abstract
MOTIVATION: Prediction of peptide binding to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) plays a vital role in the development of therapeutic vaccines for the treatment of cancer. Algorithms with improved correlations between predicted and actual binding affinities are needed to increase precision and reduce the number of false positive predictions. RESULTS: We present ACME (Attention-based Convolutional neural networks for MHC Epitope binding prediction), a new pan-specific algorithm to accurately predict the binding affinities between peptides and MHC class I molecules, even for those new alleles that are not seen in the training data. Extensive tests have demonstrated that ACME can significantly outperform other state-of-the-art prediction methods with an increase of the Pearson correlation coefficient between predicted and measured binding affinities by up to 23 percentage points. In addition, its ability to identify strong-binding peptides has been experimentally validated. Moreover, by integrating the convolutional neural network with attention mechanism, ACME is able to extract interpretable patterns that can provide useful and detailed insights into the binding preferences between peptides and their MHC partners. All these results have demonstrated that ACME can provide a powerful and practically useful tool for the studies of peptide-MHC class I interactions. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: ACME is available as an open source software at https://github.com/HYsxe/ACME. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
MOTIVATION: Prediction of peptide binding to the major histocompatibility complex (MHC) plays a vital role in the development of therapeutic vaccines for the treatment of cancer. Algorithms with improved correlations between predicted and actual binding affinities are needed to increase precision and reduce the number of false positive predictions. RESULTS: We present ACME (Attention-based Convolutional neural networks for MHC Epitope binding prediction), a new pan-specific algorithm to accurately predict the binding affinities between peptides and MHC class I molecules, even for those new alleles that are not seen in the training data. Extensive tests have demonstrated that ACME can significantly outperform other state-of-the-art prediction methods with an increase of the Pearson correlation coefficient between predicted and measured binding affinities by up to 23 percentage points. In addition, its ability to identify strong-binding peptides has been experimentally validated. Moreover, by integrating the convolutional neural network with attention mechanism, ACME is able to extract interpretable patterns that can provide useful and detailed insights into the binding preferences between peptides and their MHC partners. All these results have demonstrated that ACME can provide a powerful and practically useful tool for the studies of peptide-MHC class I interactions. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: ACME is available as an open source software at https://github.com/HYsxe/ACME. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.