Transfer Learning for Predicting Virus-Host Protein Interactions for Novel Virus Sequences

Viruses such as SARS-CoV-2 infect the human body by forming interactions between virus proteins and human proteins. However, experimental methods to find protein interactions are inadequate: large scale experiments are noisy, and small scale experiments are slow and expensive. Inspired by the recent successes of deep neural networks, we hypothesize that deep learning methods are well-positioned to aid and augment biological experiments, hoping to help identify more accurate virus-host protein interaction maps. Moreover, computational methods can quickly adapt to predict how virus mutations change protein interactions with the host proteins. We propose DeepVHPPI, a novel deep learning framework combining a self-attention-based transformer architecture and a transfer learning training strategy to predict interactions between human proteins and virus proteins that have novel sequence patterns. We show that our approach outperforms the state-of-the-art methods significantly in predicting Virus-Human protein interactions for SARS-CoV-2, H1N1, and Ebola. In addition, we demonstrate how our framework can be used to predict and interpret the interactions of mutated SARS-CoV-2 Spike protein sequences.