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PDP-Miner: an AI/ML tool to detect prophage tail proteins with depolymerase domains across thousands of bacterial genomes

2025· article· en· W4413396779 on OpenAlex

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.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.

Bibliographic record

VenueBioinformatics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicMachine Learning in Bioinformatics
Canadian institutionsUniversité Laval
Fundersnot available
KeywordsProphageGenomeBacteriophageBacterial genome sizeSource codeComputational biologyComputer scienceBiologySoftwareGeneGeneticsProgramming languageEscherichia coli

Abstract

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MOTIVATION: Antibiotic resistance is predicted to become the leading cause of human mortality by 2050. Despite this, no other major antibiotic class has been approved for medical use since 1987. Nevertheless, phage tail proteins offer a promising alternative, given their depolymerase activity toward outer membrane polysaccharides. Several pathogenic bacteria harbor prophages, thus making these prophages' molecular target already known. RESULTS: We therefore developed a wrapper for an existing machine learning-based phage depolymerase prediction tool (Depolymerase-Predictor), called PDP-Miner, which annotates phage tail proteins ab initio, detects depolymerase activity within this candidate protein subset, and then performs post-hoc validation by annotating protein domains thereby allowing the user to investigate for protein domains indicative of depolymerase activity. This tool allowed identification of 10 high confidence phage depolymerase gene candidates across all 1294 Pseudomonas genomes available on the International Pseudomonas Consortium Database while also accurately reporting depolymerases in known phage genomes, similarly to other software like PhageDPO or DepoScope. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: Source code, test datasets and documentation are freely available for download at http:///www.github.com/jeffgauthier/pdpminer. This software is free and open source under the GNU General Public License v3.0.

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 imitation

Not 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.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesMeta-epidemiology (narrow)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.169
Threshold uncertainty score1.000

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

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.

Opus teacher head0.005
GPT teacher head0.260
Teacher spread0.255 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it