Assessing sequence-based protein–protein interaction predictors for use in therapeutic peptide engineering
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Engineering peptides to achieve a desired therapeutic effect through the inhibition of a specific target activity or protein interaction is a non-trivial task. Few of the existing in silico peptide design algorithms generate target-specific peptides. Instead, many methods produce peptides that achieve a desired effect through an unknown mechanism. In contrast with resource-intensive high-throughput experiments, in silico screening is a cost-effective alternative that can prune the space of candidates when engineering target-specific peptides. Using a set of FDA-approved peptides we curated specifically for this task, we assess the applicability of several sequence-based protein-protein interaction predictors as a screening tool within the context of peptide therapeutic engineering. We show that similarity-based protein-protein interaction predictors are more suitable for this purpose than the state-of-the-art deep learning methods publicly available at the time of writing. We also show that this approach is mostly useful when designing new peptides against targets for which naturally-occurring interactors are already known, and that deploying it for de novo peptide engineering tasks may require gathering additional target-specific training data. Taken together, this work offers evidence that supports the use of similarity-based protein-protein interaction predictors for peptide therapeutic engineering, especially peptide analogs.
Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it