scholarly journals Scoring Protein Sequence Alignments Using Deep Learning

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Bikash Shrestha ◽  
Badri Adhikari

Background: A high-quality sequence alignment (SA) is the most important input feature for accurate protein structure prediction. For a protein sequence, there are many methods to generate a SA. However, when given a choice of more than one SA for a protein sequence, there are no methods to predict which SA may lead to more accurate models without actually building the models. In this work, we describe a method to predict the quality of a protein's SA. Methods: We created our own dataset by generating a variety of SAs for a set of 1,351 representative proteins and investigated various deep learning architectures to predict the local distance difference test (lDDT) scores of distance maps predicted with SAs as the input. These lDDT scores serve as indicators of the quality of the SAs. Results: Using two independent test datasets consisting of CASP13 and CASP14 targets, we show that our method is effective for scoring and ranking SAs when a pool of SAs is available for a protein sequence. With an example, we further discuss that SA selection using our method can lead to improved structure prediction.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Aashish Jain ◽  
Genki Terashi ◽  
Yuki Kagaya ◽  
Sai Raghavendra Maddhuri Venkata Subramaniya ◽  
Charles Christoffer ◽  
...  

ABSTRACTProtein 3D structure prediction has advanced significantly in recent years due to improving contact prediction accuracy. This improvement has been largely due to deep learning approaches that predict inter-residue contacts and, more recently, distances using multiple sequence alignments (MSAs). In this work we present AttentiveDist, a novel approach that uses different MSAs generated with different E-values in a single model to increase the co-evolutionary information provided to the model. To determine the importance of each MSA’s feature at the inter-residue level, we added an attention layer to the deep neural network. The model is trained in a multi-task fashion to also predict backbone and orientation angles further improving the inter-residue distance prediction. We show that AttentiveDist outperforms the top methods for contact prediction in the CASP13 structure prediction competition. To aid in structure modeling we also developed two new deep learning-based sidechain center distance and peptide-bond nitrogen-oxygen distance prediction models. Together these led to a 12% increase in TM-score from the best server method in CASP13 for structure prediction.


Author(s):  
Mu Gao ◽  
Jeffrey Skolnick

Abstract Motivation From evolutionary interference, function annotation to structural prediction, protein sequence comparison has provided crucial biological insights. While many sequence alignment algorithms have been developed, existing approaches often cannot detect hidden structural relationships in the ‘twilight zone’ of low sequence identity. To address this critical problem, we introduce a computational algorithm that performs protein Sequence Alignments from deep-Learning of Structural Alignments (SAdLSA, silent ‘d’). The key idea is to implicitly learn the protein folding code from many thousands of structural alignments using experimentally determined protein structures. Results To demonstrate that the folding code was learned, we first show that SAdLSA trained on pure α-helical proteins successfully recognizes pairs of structurally related pure β-sheet protein domains. Subsequent training and benchmarking on larger, highly challenging datasets show significant improvement over established approaches. For challenging cases, SAdLSA is ∼150% better than HHsearch for generating pairwise alignments and ∼50% better for identifying the proteins with the best alignments in a sequence library. The time complexity of SAdLSA is O(N) thanks to GPU acceleration. Availability and implementation Datasets and source codes of SAdLSA are available free of charge for academic users at http://sites.gatech.edu/cssb/sadlsa/. Contact [email protected] or [email protected] Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Aashish Jain ◽  
Genki Terashi ◽  
Yuki Kagaya ◽  
Sai Raghavendra Maddhuri Venkata Subramaniya ◽  
Charles Christoffer ◽  
...  

AbstractProtein 3D structure prediction has advanced significantly in recent years due to improving contact prediction accuracy. This improvement has been largely due to deep learning approaches that predict inter-residue contacts and, more recently, distances using multiple sequence alignments (MSAs). In this work we present AttentiveDist, a novel approach that uses different MSAs generated with different E-values in a single model to increase the co-evolutionary information provided to the model. To determine the importance of each MSA’s feature at the inter-residue level, we added an attention layer to the deep neural network. We show that combining four MSAs of different E-value cutoffs improved the model prediction performance as compared to single E-value MSA features. A further improvement was observed when an attention layer was used and even more when additional prediction tasks of bond angle predictions were added. The improvement of distance predictions were successfully transferred to achieve better protein tertiary structure modeling.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Yumeng Yan ◽  
Sheng-You Huang

AbstractProtein-protein interactions play a fundamental role in all cellular processes. Therefore, determining the structure of protein-protein complexes is crucial to understand their molecular mechanisms and develop drugs targeting the protein-protein interactions. Recently, deep learning has led to a breakthrough in intraprotein contact prediction, achieving an unusual high accuracy in recent CASP structure prediction challenges. However, due to the limited number of known homologous protein-protein interactions and the challenge to generate joint multiple sequence alignments (MSA) of two interacting proteins, the advances in inter-protein contact prediction remain limited. Here, we have proposed a deep learning model to predict inter-protein residue-residue contacts across homo-oligomeric protein interfaces, named as DeepHomo, by integrating evolutionary coupling, sequence conservation, distance map, docking pattern, and physic-chemical information of monomers. DeepHomo was extensively tested on both experimentally determined structures and realistic CASP-CAPRI targets. It was shown that DeepHomo achieved a high accuracy of >60% for the top predicted contact and outperformed state-of-the-art direct-coupling analysis (DCA) and machine learning (ML)-based approaches. Integrating predicted contacts into protein docking with blindly predicted monomer structures also significantly improved the docking accuracy. The present study demonstrated the success of DeepHomo in inter-protein contact prediction. It is anticipated that DeepHomo will have a far-reaching implication in the inter-protein contact and structure prediction for protein-protein interactions.


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