Genome wide identification of Plant based natural Antimicrobial Peptides using deep learning approach in Black pepper

Background Black pepper ( Piper nigrum , 2n = 52) has been traditionally used for the treatment of various diseases owing to its therapeutic properties, namely , antimicrobial, anti-inflammatory, antioxidant and anti-cancerous properties since time immemorial. Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) aka ‘nature's antibiotics’ or ‘host defense peptides’ produced by most living organisms as an innate immune response against microbes and have gained popularity due to rising multidrug resistance of microorganisms, new microbial infections, and a great dearth of novel antibiotics in recent years. A Numerous studies are reported on AMPs’ defense mechanism and its different modes of action in animals, showing its immunomodulatory properties and potentiality in combating against multi-drug resistant microbes. But in plants, especially spice crops, like black pepper, that has huge therapeutic properties and potential to improve immunity to combat against microbial infections needed to be further explored. Result This study provides a species-specific AMP candidate prediction server BPepAMPred (http://login1.cabgrid.res.in:5040/) based on 10 fold cross validated bidirectional- gated recurrent unit based deep neural network architecture with 99.34% accuracy, 98.68% sensitivity, 98.67% specificity. This server also linked with BPepAMPdb (http://backlin.cabgrid.res.in/blackpepper_amp_db/) which catalogs predicted 43759 AMP candidates across black pepper proteome along with 10935 functionally associated unique genes, chromosome number, genomic location, associated gene ids and functional properties. Conclusion The exhaustive molecular information of black pepper crop at one place in the user-friendly way to access would be beneficial for the breeders for black pepper improvement program. It could be utilized by molecular biologists for wet-lab preparation and validation of AMPs which could further be used in the development of novel therapeutic molecule and help to enhance the microbial resistance in black pepper and other crops.