MoFormer: Multi-objective Antimicrobial Peptide Generation Based on Conditional Transformer Joint Multi-modal Fusion Descriptor

Abstract: Deep learning holds a big promise for optimizing existing peptides with more desirable properties, a critical step towards accelerating new drug discovery. Despite the recent emergence of several optimized Antimicrobial peptides(AMP) generation methods, multi-objective optimizations remain still quite challenging for the idealism-realism tradeoff. Here, we establish a multi-objective AMP synthesis pipeline (MoFormer) for the simultaneous optimization of multi-attributes of AMPs. MoFormer improves the desired attributes of AMP sequences in a highly structured latent space, guided by conditional constraints and fine-grained multi-descriptor.We show that MoFormer outperforms existing methods in the generation task of enhanced antimicrobial activity and minimal hemolysis. We also utilize a Pareto-based non-dominated sorting algorithm and proxies based on large model fine-tuning to hierarchically rank the candidates. We demonstrate substantial property improvement using MoFormer from two perspectives: (1) employing molecular simulations and scoring interactions among amino acids to decipher the structure and functionality of AMPs; (2) visualizing latent space to examine the qualities and distribution features, verifying an effective means to facilitate multi-objective optimization AMPs with design constraints