MULoc-target: Targeting peptide classification and detection using a protein language model

Protein targeting, often guided by targeting peptides, is a critical biological process that directs proteins to their specific cellular destinations, ensuring proper cellular functionality and organization. Accurate classification and detection of targeting peptides are fundamental to understanding protein sorting mechanisms. This study introduces MULoc-Target, a novel deep-learning method designed to detect and classify targeting peptides in eukaryotic proteins. To support its development and evaluation, we curated a benchmark dataset comprising eight types of eukaryotic targeting peptides with manually curated annotations. Comprehensive evaluations on this dataset and external datasets from the literature demonstrate that MULoc-Target achieves state-of-the-art or competitive performance in detecting and classifying targeting peptides. Additionally, it enables the extraction of enriched motif patterns, offering valuable insights into their properties and the underlying targeting mechanisms. The identified motifs align closely with established biological features, further validating MULoc-Target's capabilities. A web server for MULoc-Target is integrated into our MULocDeep localization suite as a new toolkit, publicly accessible at https://mu-loc.org/MULoc-Target, and the inference code is available at https://github.com/yuexujiang/MULoc-Target.