DeepTP: A Deep Learning Model for Thermophilic Protein Prediction

Thermophilic proteins have important value in the fields of biopharmaceuticals and enzyme engineering. Most existing thermophilic protein prediction models are based on traditional machine learning algorithms and do not fully utilize protein sequence information. To solve this problem, a deep learning model based on self-attention and multiple-channel feature fusion was proposed to predict thermophilic proteins, called DeepTP. First, a large new dataset consisting of 20,842 proteins was constructed. Second, a convolutional neural network and bidirectional long short-term memory network were used to extract the hidden features in protein sequences. Different weights were then assigned to features through self-attention, and finally, biological features were integrated to build a prediction model. In a performance comparison with existing methods, DeepTP had better performance and scalability in an independent balanced test set and validation set, with AUC values of 0.944 and 0.801, respectively. In the unbalanced test set, DeepTP had an average precision (AP) of 0.536. The tool is freely available.