π-HelixNovo2: Making Accurate Online <i>De Novo</i> Peptide Sequencing Available to All

De novo peptide sequencing, the mainstream technique for identifying novel peptides, has recently seen remarkable improvements due to deep learning approaches. However, existing models struggle to effectively enhance the encoding of mass spectra and the decoding of amino acids, which limits their overall performance. Moreover, these models lack peptide filtering for de novo peptides, and often present challenges for users without programming expertise. Here, we propose π-HelixNovo2, a de novo peptide sequencing model that integrates complementary spectrum and bidirectional decoding within a Transformer framework. We further propose a peptide filtering strategy to identify the correct peptide-spectrum matches from the results of π-HelixNovo2. Our experiments demonstrate that π-HelixNovo2 outperforms state-of-the-art models, offering reliable performance in identifying antibody peptides, multi-enzyme cleavage peptides, non-enzymatic peptides, and analyzing the gut metaproteome. Finally, we trained π-HelixNovo2 on the large-scale MassIVE-KB dataset, and present an open, user-friendly, and online computational platform to make π-HelixNovo2 freely available to all (https://openi.pcl.ac.cn/OpenI/pi-HelixNovo-NPU).

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Publication Details

Journal
Genomics Proteomics & Bioinformatics
Published
2026-06-25
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/gpbjnl/qzag049
Primary Topic
Advanced Proteomics Techniques and Applications
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
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article

π-HelixNovo2: Making Accurate Online De Novo Peptide Sequencing Available to All

Zexuan Yi, Cheng Lai, Cheng Chang, Zhendong Liang et al.
Genomics Proteomics & Bioinformatics
Advanced Proteomics Techniques and Applications
article

π-HelixNovo2: Making Accurate Online De Novo Peptide Sequencing Available to All

Zexuan Yi, Cheng Lai, Cheng Chang, Zhendong Liang, Leyuan Li, Yu Wang, Tianze Ling, Tingpeng Yang, Yue Yu, Yonghong He, Boyan Sun, Jiangli Hu
article en

Abstract

De novo peptide sequencing, the mainstream technique for identifying novel peptides, has recently seen remarkable improvements due to deep learning approaches. However, existing models struggle to effectively enhance the encoding of mass spectra and the decoding of amino acids, which limits their overall performance. Moreover, these models lack peptide filtering for de novo peptides, and often present challenges for users without programming expertise. Here, we propose π-HelixNovo2, a de novo peptide sequencing model that integrates complementary spectrum and bidirectional decoding within a Transformer framework. We further propose a peptide filtering strategy to identify the correct peptide-spectrum matches from the results of π-HelixNovo2. Our experiments demonstrate that π-HelixNovo2 outperforms state-of-the-art models, offering reliable performance in identifying antibody peptides, multi-enzyme cleavage peptides, non-enzymatic peptides, and analyzing the gut metaproteome. Finally, we trained π-HelixNovo2 on the large-scale MassIVE-KB dataset, and present an open, user-friendly, and online computational platform to make π-HelixNovo2 freely available to all (https://openi.pcl.ac.cn/OpenI/pi-HelixNovo-NPU).

Genomics Proteomics & Bioinformatics
Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences & Peking Union Medical College (CN), University Town of Shenzhen (CN), Tsinghua–Berkeley Shenzhen Institute (CN), Peng Cheng Laboratory (CN), Beijing Proteome Research Center (CN), Tsinghua University (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 13%
Advanced Proteomics Techniques and Applications
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