AI Uncovers Antibiotic Potential in Prion Proteins

WHO:

Phys.org - Researchers from the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania conducted the study on antibiotic candidates in prion proteins.

WHAT:

Phys.org - New research suggests that prion and prion-like proteins may contain short peptides, termed "prionins," that can kill bacteria, potentially leading to new antibiotic candidates for drug-resistant bacteria.

Nature - The study curated 2,897 UniProt entries annotated with the prion keyword, resulting in the identification of 19,324,138 unique candidate encrypted peptides.

Nature - APEX 1.1, an updated deep learning framework, was used to predict antimicrobial activity, generating predicted minimum inhibitory concentration (MIC) values against 11 pathogenic bacterial strains.

WHERE:

Phys.org - The research was conducted at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania.

WHEN:

Nature - The UniProt entries were accessed on "24 October 2023."

WHY:

Phys.org - The study indicates that proteins known for their role in neurodegeneration may also contain features linked to immune defense, suggesting a dual function.

HOW:

Nature - APEX 1.1 utilized a peptide-sequence encoder based on recurrent and attention neural network components to generate a learned hidden representation of each peptide sequence for antimicrobial prediction.

Nature - The model was trained on an in-house dataset comprising 1,642 peptides and 15,718 MIC measurements across 11 pathogenic strains, along with 19,564 public antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) and 9,857 non-AMPs.

(UPDATED June 19, 2026 19:30 UTC)

Researchers at the Perelman School of Medicine at the University of Pennsylvania have discovered that prion and prion-like proteins may harbor short peptides, called "prionins," which could serve as new antibiotic candidates against drug-resistant bacteria. Their study analyzed nearly 19.3 million unique candidate peptides using an advanced deep learning framework known as APEX 1.1, which predicted antimicrobial activity against eleven pathogenic bacterial strains. This research suggests that proteins traditionally associated with neurodegeneration might also play a role in immune defense, highlighting their potential dual function.