Whole-genome prediction of bacterial pathogenic capacity on novel bacteria using protein language models, with PathogenFinder2
Ferrer Florensa, A.; Almagro Armenteros, J. J.; Kaas, R. S.; Clausen, P. T.; Nielsen, H.; Rost, B.; Aarestrup, F. M.
Show abstract
Infectious diseases continue to be a leading cause of mortality and pose a significant global health threat. Thus the development of tools for surveillance and early detection of emerging pathogens is needed. In this study, we introduce PathogenFinder2, a novel predictor of bacterial pathogenic capacity in humans, available through an online server (http://genepi.food.dtu.dk/pathogenfinder2), or as a standalone program (https://github.com/genomicepidemiology/PathogenFinder2). The model, using protein language models for whole-genome phenotype prediction, surpasses the performance of previous methods, especially for novel bacterial taxa, while being taxonomy-agnostic and alignment-free. At the same time, it predicts the importance of each protein for the pathogenic capacity. This output might aid in characterizing potential pathogens, it readily identifies new candidates for virulence factors and vaccine targets, and offers insights into infection metabolic pathways. Furthermore, we introduce the Bacterial Pathogenic Landscape, revealing distributions related to the host conditions, antagonist bacteria, infection site, or habitat.
Matching journals
The top 8 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
Similar papers in this journal
"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.