Microbial resistance to antibiotics is a rising concern among health care professionals, driving them to search for alternative therapies. In the past few years, antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) have attracted a lot of attention as a substitute for conventional antibiotics. Antimicrobial peptides have a broad spectrum of activity and can act as antibacterial, antifungal, antiviral and sometimes even as anticancer drugs. The antibacterial peptides have little sequence homology, despite common properties. Since there is a need to develop a computational method for predicting the antibacterial peptides, in the present study, we have applied the concept of Chou's pseudo-amino acid composition (PseAAC) and machine learning methods for their classification. Our results demonstrate that using the concept of PseAAC and applying Support Vector Machine (SVM) can provide useful information to predict antibacterial peptides.

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Traditional antiviral therapies are expensive, limitedly available, and cause several side effects. Currently, designing antiviral peptides is very important, because these peptides interfere with the key stage of virus life cycle. Most of the antiviral peptides are derived from viral proteins for example peptide derived from HIV-1 capsid protein. Because of the importance of these peptides, in this study the concept of pseudo-amino acid composition (PseAAC) and machine learning methods are used to classify or identify antiviral peptides.

In daily life, we are frequently attacked by infection organisms such as bacteria and viruses. Major Histocompatibility (MHC) molecules have an essential role in T-cell activation and initiating an adaptive immune response. Development of methods for prediction of MHC-Peptide binding is important in vaccine design and immunotherapy. In this study, we try to predict the binding between peptides and MHC class II. Support vector machine (SVM) and Multi-Layer Perceptron (MLP) are used for classification. These classifiers based on pseudo amino acid compositions of data that we extracted from PseAAC server, classify the data. Since, the dataset, used in this work, is imbalanced, we apply a preprocessing step to over-sample the minority class and come over this problem. The results show that using the concept of pseudo amino acid composition and applying over-sampling method, increases the performance of predictor. Furthermore, the results demonstrate that using the concept of PseAAC and SVM is a successful method for the prediction of MHC class II molecules.

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