A Machine Learning Classification Model for Gold-Binding Peptides

There has been growing interest in using peptides for the controlled synthesis of nanomaterials. Peptides play a crucial role not only in regulating the nanostructure formation process but also in influencing the resulting properties of the nanomaterials. Leveraging machine learning (ML) in the biomimetic workflow is anticipated to accelerate peptide discovery, make the process more resource-efficient, and unravel associations among attributes that may be useful in peptide design. In this study, a binary ML classifier is formulated that was trained and tested on 1720 peptide examples. The support vector machine classifier uses Kidera factors to categorize peptides into one of two groups based on their binding ability. The classifier exhibits satisfactory performance, as demonstrated by various performance metrics. In addition, key variables that bear a huge impact on the model were identified, such as peptide hydrophobicity. As these trends were derived from a large and diverse dataset, the insights drawn from the data are expected to be generalizable and robust. Thus, the presented ML model is an important step toward the rational and predictive peptide design.