COVIDier: A Deep-learning Tool For Coronaviruses Genome And Virulence Proteins Classification

Abstract

COVID-19, caused by SARS-CoV-2 infection, has already reached pandemic proportions in a matter of a few weeks. At the time of writing this manuscript, the unprecedented public health crisis caused more than 2.5 million cases with a mortality range of 5-7%. The SARS-CoV-2, also called novel Coronavirus, is related to both SARS-CoV and bat SARS. Great efforts have been spent to control the pandemic that has become a significant burden on the health systems in a short time. Since the emergence of the crisis, a great number of researchers started to use the AI tools to identify drugs, diagnosing using CT scan images, scanning body temperature, and classifying the severity of the disease. The emergence of variants of the SARS-CoV-2 genome is a challenging problem with expected serious consequences on the management of the disease. Here, we introduce COVIDier, a deep learning-based software that is enabled to classify the different genomes of Alpha coronavirus, Beta coronavirus, MERS, SARS-CoV-1, SARS-CoV-2, and bronchitis-CoV. COVIDier was trained on 1925 genomes, belonging to the three families of SARS retrieved from NCBI Database to propose a new method to train deep learning model trained on genome data using Multi-layer Perceptron Classifier (MLPClassifier), a deep learning algorithm, that could blindly predict the virus family name from the genome of by predicting the statistically similar genome from training data to the given genome. COVIDier able to predict how close the emerging novel genomes of SARS to the known genomes with accuracy 99%. COVIDier can replace tools like BLAST that consume higher CPU and time.