Anastasiya V Kulikova

Nov 15, 2023 | biorxiv.org | Anastasiya V Kulikova |Jennifer Parker |Bryan Davies |Claus O. Wilke

AbstractClass II microcins are antimicrobial peptides that have shown some potential as novel antibiotics. However, to date only ten class II microcins have been described, and discovery of novel microcins has been hampered by their short length and high sequence divergence. Here, we ask if we can use numerical embeddings generated by protein large language models to detect microcins in bacterial genome assemblies and whether this method can outperform sequence-based methods such as BLAST.