PepMCP: A Graph-Based Membrane Contact Probability Predictor for Membrane-Lytic Antimicrobial Peptides

Clicks: 1
ID: 318874
2026
Article Quality & Performance Metrics
Overall Quality
Not rated
Combines reader engagement with the AI quality analysis. This article has not been analysed, so there is no overall score — reader engagement is measured and shown alongside.
AI Quality Assessment
Not analyzed
Readership in this journal

Ranked #801 of 829 articles by views in BMC Bioinformatics

Most read Least read

Bar heights use a square-root scale. Only the 120 most-read articles are drawn; the journal has 829 in total.

Mint this article as an NFT
Not yet minted

Create a permanent, verifiable on-chain record of this article on the Scimatic Network. The NFT is held in your Journament account, and you can withdraw it to your own wallet at any time.

5 SUSD one-off · no wallet required
Abstract
Abstract Motivation The membrane-lytic mechanism of antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) is often overlooked during their in silico discovery process, largely due to the lack of a suitable metric for the membrane-binding propensity of peptides. Previously, we proposed a characteristic called membrane contact probability (MCP) and applied it to the identification of membrane proteins and membrane-lytic AMPs. However, previous MCP predictors were not trained on short peptides targeting bacterial membranes, which may result in unsatisfactory performance for peptide studies. Results In this study, we present PepMCP, a peptide-tailored model for predicting MCP values of short peptides. We collected more than 500 membrane-lytic AMPs from the literature, conducted coarse-grained molecular dynamics (MD) simulations for these AMPs, and extracted their residue MCP labels from MD trajectories to train PepMCP. PepMCP employs the GraphSAGE framework to address this node regression task, encoding each peptide sequence as a graph with 4-hop edges. PepMCP achieved a Pearson correlation coefficient of 0.883 and an RMSE of 0.123 on the node-level test set. It can recognize membrane-lytic AMPs with the predicted MCP values for each sequence, thereby facilitating mechanism-driven AMP discovery. Additionally, we provide a database, MemAMPdb, which includes the membrane-lytic AMPs, as well as the PepMCP web server for easy access. Availability and Implementation The code and data are available at https://github.com/ComputBiophys/PepMCP. Supplementary Information Supplementary data are available online.
Reference Key
openalex_W7166050394 Use this key to autocite in the manuscript while using SciMatic Manuscript Manager or Thesis Manager
Authors Ruihan Dong, Tadsanee Awang, Qiushi Cao, Kai Kang, Lei Wang, Zefeng Zhu, Chen Song
Journal BMC Bioinformatics
Year 2026
DOI
10.1093/bioinformatics/btag453
URL
Keywords Keywords not found

Citations

No citations found. To add a citation, contact the admin at info@scimatic.org

No comments yet. Be the first to comment on this article.