Machine and deep learning to predict viral fusion peptides.

ABSTRACT: Viral fusion proteins, located on the surface of enveloped viruses like SARS-CoV-2, Influenza, and HIV, play a vital role in fusing the virus envelope with the host cell membrane. Fusion peptides, conserved segments within these proteins, are crucial for the fusion process and are potential targets for therapy. Experimental identification of fusion peptides is time-consuming and costly, which creates the need for bioinformatics tools that can predict the segment within the fusion protein sequence that corresponds to the FP. Although homology-based methods have been used towards this end, they fail to identify fusion peptides lacking overall sequence similarity to known counterparts. Therefore, alternative methods are needed to discover new putative fusion peptides, namely those based on ma

SUBMITTER: Sequeira AM 

PROVIDER: S-EPMC11903910 | biostudies-literature | 2025

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature