IL13Pred: A method for predicting immunoregulatory cytokine IL-13 inducing peptides for managing COVID-19 severity

Interleukin 13 (IL-13) is an immunoregulatory cytokine that is primarily released by activated T-helper 2 cells. It induces the pathogenesis of many allergic diseases, such as airway hyperresponsiveness, glycoprotein hypersecretion and goblet cell hyperplasia. IL-13 also inhibits tumor immunosurveillance, which leads to carcinogenesis. In recent studies, elevated IL-13 serum levels have been shown in severe COVID-19 patients. Thus it is important to predict IL-13 inducing peptides or regions in a protein for designing safe protein therapeutics particularly immunotherapeutic. This paper describes a method developed for predicting, designing and scanning IL-13 inducing peptides. The dataset used in this study contain experimentally validated 313 IL-13 inducing peptides and 2908 non-inducing homo-sapiens peptides extracted from the immune epitope database (IEDB). We have extracted 95 key features using SVC-L1 technique from the originally generated 9165 features using Pfeature. Further, these key features were ranked based on their prediction ability, and top 10 features were used for building machine learning prediction models. In this study, we have deployed various machine learning techniques to develop models for predicting IL-13 inducing peptides. These models were trained, test and evaluated using five-fold cross-validation techniques; best model were evaluated on independent dataset. Our best model based on XGBoost achieves a maximum AUC of 0.83 and 0.80 on the training and independent dataset, respectively. Our analysis indicate that certain SARS-COV2 variants are more prone to induce IL-13 in COVID-19 patients. A standalone package as well as a web server named ‘IL-13Pred’ has been developed for predicting IL-13 inducing peptides (https://webs.iiitd.edu.in/raghava/il13pred/).Key PointsInterleukin-13, an immunoregulatory cytokine plays an important role in increasing severity of COVID-19 and other diseases.IL-13Pred is a highly accurate in-silico method developed for predicting the IL-13 inducing peptides/ epitopes.IL-13 inducing peptides are reported in various SARS-CoV2 strains/variants proteins.This method can be used to detect IL-13 inducing peptides in vaccine candidates.User friendly web server and standalone software is freely available for IL-13PredAuthor’s BiographyShipra Jain is currently working as Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.Anjali Dhall is currently working as Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.Sumeet Patiyal is currently working as Ph.D. in Computational Biology from Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.Gajendra P. S. Raghava is currently working as Professor and Head of Department of Computational Biology, Indraprastha Institute of Information Technology, New Delhi, India.