  Functional peptides have the potential to treat a variety of diseases. Their
good therapeutic efficacy and low toxicity make them ideal therapeutic agents.
Artificial intelligence-based computational strategies can help quickly
identify new functional peptides from collections of protein sequences and
discover their different functions.Using protein language model-based
embeddings (ESM-2), we developed a tool called pLMFPPred (Protein Language
Model-based Functional Peptide Predictor) for predicting functional peptides
and identifying toxic peptides. We also introduced SMOTE-TOMEK data synthesis
sampling and Shapley value-based feature selection techniques to relieve data
imbalance issues and reduce computational costs. On a validated independent
test set, pLMFPPred achieved accuracy, Area under the curve - Receiver
Operating Characteristics, and F1-Score values of 0.974, 0.99, and 0.974,
respectively. Comparative experiments show that pLMFPPred outperforms current
methods for predicting functional peptides.The experimental results suggest
that the proposed method (pLMFPPred) can provide better performance in terms of
Accuracy, Area under the curve - Receiver Operating Characteristics, and
F1-Score than existing methods. pLMFPPred has achieved good performance in
predicting functional peptides and represents a new computational method for
predicting functional peptides.
