NeuroPred-AIMP: Multimodal Deep Learning for Neuropeptide Prediction via Protein Language Modeling and Temporal Convolutional Networks

Neuropeptides are key signaling molecules that regulate fundamental physiological processes ranging from metabolism to cognitive function. However, accurate identification is a huge challenge due to sequence heterogeneity, obscured functional motifs and limited experimentally validated data. Accurate identification of neuropeptides is critical for advancing neurological disease therapeutics and peptide-based drug design. Existing neuropeptide identification methods rely on manual features combined with traditional machine learning methods, which are difficult to capture the deep patterns of sequences. To address these limitations, we propose NeuroPred-AIMP (adaptive integrated multimodal predictor), an interpretable model that synergizes global semantic representation of the protein language model (ESM) and the multiscale structural features of the temporal convolutional network (TCN). The model introduced the adaptive features fusion mechanism of residual enhancement to dynamically recalibrate feature contributions, to achieve robust integration of evolutionary and local sequence information. The experimental results demonstrated that the proposed model showed excellent comprehensive performance on the independence test set, with an accuracy of 92.3% and the AUROC of 0.974. Simultaneously, the model showed good balance in the ability to identify positive and negative samples, with a sensitivity of 92.6% and a specificity of 92.1%, with a difference of less than 0.5%. The result fully confirms the effectiveness of the multimodal features strategy in the task of neuropeptide recognition.