Deepro-Glu: combination of convolutional neural network and Bi-LSTM models using ProtBert and handcrafted features to...

Lysine glutarylation (Kglu) is a newly discovered post-translational modification of proteins with important roles in mitochondrial functions, oxidative damage, etc. The established biological experimental methods to identify glutarylation sites are often time-consuming and costly. Therefore, there is an urgent need to develop computational methods for efficient and accurate identification of glutarylation sites. Most of the existing computational methods only utilize handcrafted features to construct the prediction model and do not consider the positive impact of the pre-trained protein language model on the prediction performance. Based on this, we develop an ensemble deep-learning predictor Deepro-Glu that combines convolutional neural network and bidirectional long short-term memory network using the deep learning features and traditional handcrafted features to predict lysine glutaryation sites. The deep learning features are generated from the pre-trained protein language model called ProtBert, and the handcrafted features consist of sequence-based features, physicochemical property-based features and evolution information-based features. Furthermore, the attention mechanism is used to efficiently integrate the deep learning features and the handcrafted features by learning the appropriate attention weights. 10-fold cross-validation and independent tests demonstrate that Deepro-Glu achieves competitive or superior performance than the state-of-the-art methods. The source codes and data are publicly available at https://github.com/xwanggroup/Deepro-Glu.