Discovering the nuclear localization signal universe through a deep learning model with interpretable attention units

We describe NLSExplorer, an interpretable approach for nuclear localization signal (NLS) prediction. By utilizing the extracted information on nuclear-specific sites from the protein language model to assist in NLS detection, NLSExplorer achieves superior performance with greater than 10% improvement in the F1 score compared with existing methods on benchmark datasets and highlights other nuclear transport segments. We applied NLSExplorer to the nucleus-localized proteins in the Swiss-Prot database to extract valuable segments. A comprehensive analysis of these segments revealed a potential NLS landscape and uncovered features of nuclear transport segments across 416 species. This study introduces a powerful tool for exploring the NLS universe and provides a versatile network that can efficiently detect characteristic domains and motifs.