PPII-AEAT: Prediction of protein-protein interaction inhibitors based on autoencoders with adversarial training.

Journal: Computers in biology and medicine
PMID:

Abstract

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) have shown increasing potential as novel drug targets. The design and development of small molecule inhibitors targeting specific PPIs are crucial for the prevention and treatment of related diseases. Accordingly, effective computational methods are highly desired to meet the emerging need for the large-scale accurate prediction of PPI inhibitors. However, existing machine learning models rely heavily on the manual screening of features and lack generalizability. Here, we propose a new PPI inhibitor prediction method based on autoencoders with adversarial training (named PPII-AEAT) that can adaptively learn molecule representation to cope with different PPI targets. First, Extended-connectivity fingerprints and Mordred descriptors are employed to extract the primary features of small molecular compounds. Then, an autoencoder architecture is trained in three phases to learn high-level representations and predict inhibitory scores. We evaluate PPII-AEAT on nine PPI targets and two different tasks, including the PPI inhibitor identification task and inhibitory potency prediction task. The experimental results show that our proposed PPII-AEAT outperforms state-of-the-art methods.

Authors

  • Zitong Zhang
    The Second Clinical College, Chongqing Medical University, Chongqing, China.
  • Lingling Zhao
    School of Electronic Engineering, Heilongjiang University, Harbin, China.
  • Mengyao Gao
    Faculty of Computing, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China. Electronic address: 120L021201@stu.hit.edu.cn.
  • Yuanlong Chen
    School of Financial Mathematics & Statistics, Guangdong University of Finance, Guangzhou 510521, China.
  • Junjie Wang
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China.
  • Chunyu Wang
    School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin, China.