AVPs, or antiviral peptides, are short chains of amino acids capable of inhibiting viral replication, preventing viral entry, or disrupting viral membranes. They represent a promising area of research for developing new antiviral therapies due to their potential to target a broad spectrum of viruses, incorporating those resistant to traditional antiviral drugs. However, traditional experimental methods for identifying AVPs are often costly and labour-intensive. Thus far, multiple computational methods have been introduced for the in silico identification of AVPs, but these methods still have certain shortcomings. In this study, we propose a novel stacked ensemble learning framework, termed Stack-AVP, for fast and accurate AVP identification. In Stack-AVP, we investigated heterogeneous prediction models, which were trained with 12 commonly used machine learning algorithms coupled with a wide range of multiple feature encoding schemes. Subsequently, these prediction models were adopted to generate multi-view features providing class information and probability information. Finally, we applied our feature selection method to determine the best feature subset for the construction of the final stacked model. Comparative assessments on the independent test dataset revealed that Stack-AVP surpassed the performance of current state-of-the-art methods, with an accuracy of 0.930, MCC of 0.860, and AUC of 0.975. Furthermore, it was found that our multi-view features exhibited a crucial mechanism to improve the prediction performance of AVPs. To facilitate experimental scientists in performing high-throughput identification of AVPs, the prediction sever Stack-AVP is publicly accessible at https://pmlabqsar.pythonanywhere.com/Stack-AVP.
N6-methyladenosine (m6A) modification, a prevalent epigenetic mark in eukaryotic cells, is crucial in regulating gene expression and RNA metabolism. Accurately identifying m6A modification sites is essential for understanding their functions within biological processes and the intricate mechanisms that regulate them. Recent advances in high-throughput sequencing technologies have enabled the generation of extensive datasets characterizing m6A modification sites at single-nucleotide resolution, leading to the development of computational methods for identifying m6A RNA modification sites. However, most current methods focus on specific cell lines, limiting their generalizability and practical application across diverse biological contexts. To address the limitation, we propose MST-m6A, a novel approach for identifying m6A modification sites with higher accuracy across various cell lines and tissues. MST-m6A utilizes a multi-scale transformer-based architecture, employing dual k-mer tokenization to capture rich feature representations and global contextual information from RNA sequences at multiple levels of granularity. These representations are then effectively combined using a channel fusion mechanism and further processed by a convolutional neural network to enhance prediction accuracy. Rigorous validation demonstrates that MST-m6A significantly outperforms conventional machine learning models, deep learning models, and state-of-the-art predictors. We anticipate that the high precision and cross-cell-type adaptability of MST-m6A will provide valuable insights into m6A biology and facilitate advancements in related fields. The proposed approach is available at https://github.com/cbbl-skku-org/MST-m6A/ for prediction and reproducibility purposes.