ToxiCompass: an evidence-tracked benchmark for short-peptide toxicity screening and confidence-aware assay prioritization.

ToxiCompass achieves near-perfect accuracy in short-peptide toxicity screening, with an AUC of 0.9871 and a Hit@3 of 0.8955, enabling reliable assay prioritization.

• Why it matters: Accurate early toxicity prediction is crucial for safe peptide development, but existing methods lack guidance on which assays to pursue after initial predictions. Addressing this gap improves decision-making and resource allocation in toxin research.
• What they did: The authors developed ToxiCompass, a benchmark with 6,114 peptides from biotoxin databases, employing sequence clustering, evidence tracking, and a two-stage protocol to evaluate toxicity scores and prioritize 13 target/effect families.
• The result: ToxiCompass demonstrates high reproducibility and effectiveness in linking peptide toxicity screening with evidence-based assay prioritization, facilitating more efficient and confident follow-up testing.