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Identification of drug-target interactions (DTIs) plays a key role in drug discovery. The high cost and labor-intensive nature of in vitro and in vivo experiments have highlighted the importance of in silico-based DTI prediction approaches. In several computational models, conventional protein descriptors have been shown to not be sufficiently informative to predict accurate DTIs. Thus, in this study, we propose a deep learning based DTI prediction model capturing local residue patterns of proteins participating in DTIs. When we employ a convolutional neural network (CNN) on raw protein sequences, we perform convolution on various lengths of amino acids subsequences to capture local residue patterns of generalized protein classes. We train our model with large-scale DTI information and demonstrate the performance of the proposed model using an independent dataset that is not seen during the training phase. As a result, our model performs better than previous protein descriptor-based models. Also, our model performs better than the recently developed deep learning models for massive prediction of DTIs. By examining pooled convolution results, we confirmed that our model can detect binding sites of proteins for DTIs. In conclusion, our prediction model for detecting local residue patterns of target proteins successfully enriches the protein features of a raw protein sequence, yielding better prediction results than previous approaches. Our code is available at https://github.com/GIST-CSBL/DeepConv-DTI., Author summary Drugs work by interacting with target proteins to activate or inhibit a target’s biological process. Therefore, identification of DTIs is a crucial step in drug discovery. However, identifying drug candidates via biological assays is very time and cost consuming, which introduces the need for a computational prediction approach for the identification of DTIs. In this work, we constructed a novel DTI prediction model to extract local residue patterns of target protein sequences using a CNN-based deep learning approach. As a result, the detected local features of protein sequences perform better than other protein descriptors for DTI prediction and previous models for predicting PubChem independent test datasets. That is, our approach of capturing local residue patterns with CNN successfully enriches protein features from a raw sequence.

Background Verifying the proteins that are targeted by compounds of natural herbs will be helpful to select natural herb-based drug candidates. However, this entails a great deal of effort to clarify the interaction throughout in vitro or in vivo experiments. In this light, in silico prediction of the interactions between compounds and target proteins can help ease the efforts. Results In this study, we performed in silico predictions of herbal compound target identification. First, data related to compounds, target proteins, and interactions between them are taken from the DrugBank database. Then we characterized six classes of compound-target interaction in humans including G-protein-coupled receptors (GPCRs), ion channel, enzymes, receptors, transporters, and other proteins. Also, classification-prediction models that predict the interactions between compounds and target proteins through a machine learning method were constructed using these matrices. As a result, AUC values of six classes are 0.94, 0.93, 0.90, 0.89, 0.91, and 0.76 respectively. Finally, the interactions of compounds from natural products were predicted using the constructed classification models. Furthermore, from our predicted results, we confirmed that several important disease related proteins were predicted as targets of natural herbal compounds. Conclusions We constructed classification-prediction models that predict the interactions between compounds and target proteins. The constructed models showed good prediction performances, and numbers of potential natural compounds target proteins were predicted from our results.

Predicting drug-target interactions is important for the development of novel drugs and the repositioning of drugs. To predict such interactions, there are a number of methods based on drug and target protein similarity. Although these methods, such as the bipartite local model (BLM), show promise, they often categorize unknown interactions as negative interaction. Therefore, these methods are not ideal for finding potential drug-target interactions that have not yet been validated as positive interactions. Thus, here we propose a method that integrates machine learning techniques, such as self-training support vector machine (SVM) and BLM, to develop a self-training bipartite local model (SELF-BLM) that facilitates the identification of potential interactions. The method first categorizes unlabeled interactions and negative interactions among unknown interactions using a clustering method. Then, using the BLM method and self-training SVM, the unlabeled interactions are self-trained and final local classification models are constructed. When applied to four classes of proteins that include enzymes, G-protein coupled receptors (GPCRs), ion channels, and nuclear receptors, SELF-BLM showed the best performance for predicting not only known interactions but also potential interactions in three protein classes compare to other related studies. The implemented software and supporting data are available at https://github.com/GIST-CSBL/SELF-BLM.