Cancer is a well-known killer of human beings, which has led to countless deaths and misery. Anticancer peptides open a promising perspective for cancer treatment, and they have various attractive advantages. Conventional wet experiments are expensive and inefficient for finding and identifying novel anticancer peptides. There is an urgent need to develop a novel computational method to predict novel anticancer peptides. In this study, we propose a deep learning long short-term memory (LSTM) neural network model, ACP-DL, to effectively predict novel anticancer peptides. More specifically, to fully exploit peptide sequence information, we developed an efficient feature representation approach by integrating binary profile feature and k-mer sparse matrix of the reduced amino acid alphabet. Then we implemented a deep LSTM model to automatically learn how to identify anticancer peptides and nonanticancer peptides. To our knowledge, this is the first time that the deep LSTM model has been applied to predict anticancer peptides. It was demonstrated by cross-validation experiments that the proposed ACP-DL remarkably outperformed other comparison methods with high accuracy and satisfied specificity on benchmark datasets. In addition, we also contributed two new anticancer peptides benchmark datasets, ACP740 and ACP240, in this work. The source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/haichengyi/ACP-DL.

The interactions between non-coding RNAs (ncRNAs) and proteins play an important role in many biological processes, and their biological functions are primarily achieved by binding with a variety of proteins. High-throughput biological techniques are used to identify protein molecules bound with specific ncRNA, but they are usually expensive and time consuming. Deep learning provides a powerful solution to computationally predict RNA-protein interactions. In this work, we propose the RPI-SAN model by using the deep-learning stacked auto-encoder network to mine the hidden high-level features from RNA and protein sequences and feed them into a random forest (RF) model to predict ncRNA binding proteins. Stacked assembling is further used to improve the accuracy of the proposed method. Four benchmark datasets, including RPI2241, RPI488, RPI1807, and NPInter v2.0, were employed for the unbiased evaluation of five established prediction tools: RPI-Pred, IPMiner, RPISeq-RF, lncPro, and RPI-SAN. The experimental results show that our RPI-SAN model achieves much better performance than other methods, with accuracies of 90.77%, 89.7%, 96.1%, and 99.33%, respectively. It is anticipated that RPI-SAN can be used as an effective computational tool for future biomedical researches and can accurately predict the potential ncRNA-protein interacted pairs, which provides reliable guidance for biological research.