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Emerging Computational Approaches for Antimicrobial Peptide Discovery
* 1, 2 , 3 , 1 , 4 , 5 , 6 , 2, 7
1  CIMAR/CIIMAR, Centro Interdisciplinar de Investigação Marinha e Ambiental, Universidade do Porto, Terminal de Cruzeiros do Porto de Leixões, Av. General Norton de Matos s/n 4450-208 Matosinhos, Porto, Portugal.
2  Departamento de Biologia, Faculdade de Ciências, Universidade do Porto, Rua do Campo Alegre, 4169-007 Porto, Portugal
3  Departamento de Ciencias de la Computación, Universidad Central ¨Marta Abreu¨ de Las Villas (UCLV), Santa Clara, 54830, Cuba
4  Universidad San Francisco de Quito (USFQ), 170157 Quito, Ecuador
5  EpiDisease S.L. Spin‐Off of Centro de Investigación Biomédica en Red de Enfermedades Raras (CIBERER). Valencia, España.
6  Departamento de Química Orgánica, Universidade de Vigo, 36310 Vigo, España
7  CIMAR/CIIMAR, Centro Interdisciplinar de Investigação Marinha e Ambiental, Universidade do Porto, Rua dos Bragas, 177, 4050-123 Porto, Portugal
Academic Editor: Humbert G. Díaz

Abstract:

In the last two decades many reports have addressed the application of artificial intelligence (AI) in the search and design of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs). AI has been represented by machine learning (ML) algorithms that use sequence-based features for the discovery of new peptidic scaffolds with promising biological activity. From AI perspective, evolutionary algorithms have been also applied to the rational generation of peptide libraries aimed at the optimization/design of AMPs. However, the literature has scarcely dedicated to other emerging non-conventional in silico approaches for the search/design of such bioactive peptides. Thus, the first motivation here is to bring up some non-standard peptide features that have been used to build classical ML predictive models. Secondly, it is valuable to highlight emerging ML algorithms and alternative computational tools to predict/design AMPs as well as to explore their chemical space. Another point worthy of mention is the recent application of evolutionary algorithms that actually simulate sequence evolution to both the generation of diversity-oriented peptide libraries and the optimization of hit peptides. Last but not least, included here some new considerations in proteogenomic analyses currently incorporated into the computational workflow for unravelling AMPs in natural sources (https://doi.org/10.3390/antibiotics11070936).

Keywords: artificial intelligence; machine learning; AMPs; evolutionary algorithms; molecular descriptors; complex networks; proteogenomics
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