Fig. 5: Designing dual-targeting peptides using Dual-VAE. | Nature Communications

Fig. 5: Designing dual-targeting peptides using Dual-VAE.

From: Design of diverse, functional mitochondrial targeting sequences across eukaryotic organisms using variational autoencoder

Fig. 5

a Schematic of interpolation in the latent space to generate peptides capable of targeting both mitochondria and chloroplasts. b DeepLoc 2.0 predictions for the 62 dual-targeting peptides. The likelihood of mitochondrial targeting diminishes while chloroplast targeting increases along the interpolation path from mitochondrial targeting sequences (MTS) to chloroplast targeting sequences (CTS), leading to the emergence of dual-targeting characteristics at the midpoint. All boxplots follow the standard definition: the center line represents the median, the box limits correspond to the upper and lower quartiles, the whiskers extend to 1.5 times the interquartile range, and outliers are shown as points. c Proposed evolution of dual-targeting peptides. If dual-targeting sequences evolve from MTS, they gather mutations that alter the composition of specific amino acid residues, physicochemical properties, and secondary structural features. In contrast, evolution from CTS not only requires similar mutations but also the insertion of an unstructured element at the C-terminus and modifications that incorporate a cleavage motif for recognition by mitochondrial processing peptidase. a, c Created in BioRender. Zhao, H. (2025) https://BioRender.com/rjlokd9.

Back to article page