Toward high-efficiency, low-resource, and explainable neuropeptide prediction with MSKDNP.

Neuropeptides are essential signaling molecules produced in the nervous system that regulate diverse physiological processes and are closely implicated in the pathogenesis of neurodegenerative and neuropsychiatric disorders. Investigating neuropeptides contributes to a better understanding of their regulatory mechanisms and offers new insights into therapeutic strategies for related diseases. Therefore, accurate identification of neuropeptides is crucial for advancing biomedical research and drug development. Due to the high cost of experimental validation, various artificial intelligence methods have been developed for rapid neuropeptide identification. However, existing approaches often suffer from high computational resource consumption, slow processing speed, and poor deploy ability. Moreover, a user-friendly web server for practical application is still lacking. To this end, we propose MSKDNP, a neuropeptide prediction model based on a multi-stage knowledge distillation framework. With only 1.2% of the parameters, MSKDNP attains performance comparable to a fully fine-tuned protein language model while achieving state-of-the-art results in neuropeptide recognition. Moreover, MSKDNP provides favorable interpretability, facilitating biological understanding. A freely accessible web server is available at https://awi.cuhk.edu.cn/∼biosequence/MSKDNP/index.php.