An Efficient Deep Learning Approach for DNA-Binding Proteins Classification from Primary Sequences

Abstract As the number of identified proteins has expanded, the accurate identification of proteins has become a significant challenge in the field of biology. Various computational methods, such as Support Vector Machine (SVM), K-nearest neighbors (KNN), and convolutional neural network (CNN), have been proposed to recognize deoxyribonucleic acid (DNA)-binding proteins solely based on amino acid sequences. However, these methods do not consider the contextual information within amino acid sequences, limiting their ability to adequately capture sequence features. In this study, we propose a novel approach to identify DNA-binding proteins by integrating a CNN with bidirectional long-short-term memory (LSTM) and gated recurrent unit (GRU) as (CNN-BiLG). The CNN-BiLG model can explore the potential contextual relationships of amino acid sequences and obtain more features than traditional models. Our experimental results demonstrate a validation set prediction accuracy of 94% for the proposed CNN-BiLG, surpassing the accuracy of machine learning models and deep learning models. Furthermore, our model is both effective and efficient, exhibiting commendable classification accuracy based on comparative analysis.