DeepTAP: An RNN-based method of TAP-binding peptide prediction in the selection of tumor neoantigens

The transport of peptides from the cytoplasm to the endoplasmic reticulum (ER) by transporters associated with antigen processing (TAP) is a critical step in the intracellular presentation of cytotoxic T lymphocyte (CTL) epitopes. The development and application of computational methods, especially deep learning methods and new neural network strategies that can automatically learn feature representations with limited knowledge, provide an opportunity to develop fast and efficient methods to identify TAP-binding peptides. Herein, this study presents a comprehensive analysis of TAP-binding peptide sequences to derive TAP-binding motifs and preferences for N-terminal and C-terminal amino acids. A novel recurrent neural network (RNN)-based method called DeepTAP, using bidirectional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU), was developed for the accurate prediction of TAP-binding peptides. Our results demonstrated that DeepTAP achieves an optimal balance between prediction precision and false positives, outperforming other baseline models. Furthermore, DeepTAP significantly improves the prediction accuracy of high-confidence neoantigens, especially the top-ranked ones, making it a valuable tool for researchers studying antigen presentation processes and T-cell epitope screening. DeepTAP is freely available at https://github.com/zjupgx/deeptap and https://pgx.zju.edu.cn/deeptap.