scholarly journals Improving protein tertiary structure prediction by deep learning and distance prediction in CASP14

Author(s):  
Jian Liu ◽  
Tianqi Wu ◽  
Zhiye Guo ◽  
Jie Hou ◽  
Jianlin Cheng

Substantial progresses in protein structure prediction have been made by utilizing deep-learning and residue-residue distance prediction since CASP13. Inspired by the advances, we improve our CASP14 MULTICOM protein structure prediction system in three main aspects: (1) a new deep learning based protein inter-residue distance predictor (DeepDist) to improve template-free (ab initio) tertiary structure prediction, (2) an enhanced template-based tertiary structure prediction method, and (3) distance-based model quality assessment methods empowered by deep learning. In the 2020 CASP14 experiment, MULTICOM predictor was ranked 7th out of 146 predictors in protein tertiary structure prediction and ranked 3rd out of 136 predictors in inter-domain structure predic-tion. The results of MULTICOM demonstrate that the template-free modeling based on deep learning and residue-residue distance prediction can predict the correct topology for almost all template-based modeling targets and a majority of hard targets (template-free targets or targets whose templates cannot be recognized), which is a significant improvement over the CASP13 MULTICOM predictor. The performance of template-free tertiary structure prediction largely depends on the accuracy of distance pre-dictions that is closely related to the quality of multiple sequence alignments. The structural model quality assessment works reasonably well on targets for which a sufficient number of good models can be predicted, but may perform poorly when only a few good models are predicted for a hard target and the distribution of model quality scores is highly skewed.

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jian Liu ◽  
Tianqi Wu ◽  
Zhiye Guo ◽  
Jie Hou ◽  
Jianlin Cheng

Substantial progresses in protein structure prediction have been made by utilizing deep-learning and residue-residue distance prediction since CASP13. Inspired by the advances, we improve our CASP14 MULTICOM protein structure prediction system in the three main aspects: (1) a new deep-learning based protein inter-residue distance predictor (DeepDist) to improve template-free (ab initio) tertiary structure prediction, (2) an enhanced template-based tertiary structure prediction method, and (3) distance-based model quality assessment methods empowered by deep learning. In the 2020 CASP14 experiment, MULTICOM predictor was ranked 7th out of 146 predictors in protein tertiary structure prediction and ranked 3rd out of 136 predictors in inter-domain structure prediction. The results of MULTICOM demonstrate that the template-free modeling based on deep learning and residue-residue distance prediction can predict the correct topology for almost all template-based modeling targets and a majority of hard targets (template-free targets or targets whose templates cannot be recognized), which is a significant improvement over the CASP13 MULTICOM predictor. The performance of template-free tertiary structure prediction largely depends on the accuracy of distance predictions that is closely related to the quality of multiple sequence alignments. The structural model quality assessment works reasonably well on targets for which a sufficient number of good models can be predicted, but may perform poorly when only a few good models are predicted for a hard target and the distribution of model quality scores is highly skewed.


BMC Genomics ◽  
2020 ◽  
Vol 21 (S11) ◽  
Author(s):  
Haicang Zhang ◽  
Yufeng Shen

Abstract Background Accurate prediction of protein structure is fundamentally important to understand biological function of proteins. Template-based modeling, including protein threading and homology modeling, is a popular method for protein tertiary structure prediction. However, accurate template-query alignment and template selection are still very challenging, especially for the proteins with only distant homologs available. Results We propose a new template-based modelling method called ThreaderAI to improve protein tertiary structure prediction. ThreaderAI formulates the task of aligning query sequence with template as the classical pixel classification problem in computer vision and naturally applies deep residual neural network in prediction. ThreaderAI first employs deep learning to predict residue-residue aligning probability matrix by integrating sequence profile, predicted sequential structural features, and predicted residue-residue contacts, and then builds template-query alignment by applying a dynamic programming algorithm on the probability matrix. We evaluated our methods both in generating accurate template-query alignment and protein threading. Experimental results show that ThreaderAI outperforms currently popular template-based modelling methods HHpred, CNFpred, and the latest contact-assisted method CEthreader, especially on the proteins that do not have close homologs with known structures. In particular, in terms of alignment accuracy measured with TM-score, ThreaderAI outperforms HHpred, CNFpred, and CEthreader by 56, 13, and 11%, respectively, on template-query pairs at the similarity of fold level from SCOPe data. And on CASP13’s TBM-hard data, ThreaderAI outperforms HHpred, CNFpred, and CEthreader by 16, 9 and 8% in terms of TM-score, respectively. Conclusions These results demonstrate that with the help of deep learning, ThreaderAI can significantly improve the accuracy of template-based structure prediction, especially for distant-homology proteins.


2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Haicang Zhang ◽  
Yufeng Shen

AbstractAccurate prediction of protein structure is fundamentally important to understand biological function of proteins. Template-based modeling, including protein threading and homology modeling, is a popular method for protein tertiary structure prediction. However, accurate template-query alignment and template selection are still very challenging, especially for the proteins with only distant homologs available. We propose a new template-based modelling method called ThreaderAI to improve protein tertiary structure prediction. ThreaderAI formulates the task of aligning query sequence with template as the classical pixel classification problem in computer vision and naturally applies deep residual neural network in prediction. ThreaderAI first employs deep learning to predict residue-residue aligning probability matrix by integrating sequence profile, predicted sequential structural features, and predicted residueresidue contacts, and then builds template-query alignment by applying a dynamic programming algorithm on the probability matrix. We evaluated our methods both in generating accurate template-query alignment and protein threading. Experimental results show that ThreaderAI outperforms currently popular template-based modelling methods HHpred, CNFpred, and the latest contact-assisted method CEthreader, especially on the proteins that do not have close homologs with known structures. In particular, in terms of alignment accuracy measured with TM-score, ThreaderAI outperforms HHpred, CNFpred, and CEthreader by 56%, 13%, and 11%, respectively, on template-query pairs at the similarity of fold level from SCOPe data. And on CASP13’s TBM-hard data, ThreaderAI outperforms HHpred, CNFpred, and CEthreader by 16%, 9% and 8% in terms of TM-score, respectively. These results demonstrate that with the help of deep learning, ThreaderAI can significantly improve the accuracy of template-based structure prediction, especially for distant-homology proteins.Availabilityhttps://github.com/ShenLab/ThreaderAI


2019 ◽  
Author(s):  
Jie Hou ◽  
Tianqi Wu ◽  
Renzhi Cao ◽  
Jianlin Cheng

AbstractPrediction of residue-residue distance relationships (e.g. contacts) has become the key direction to advance protein tertiary structure prediction since 2014 CASP11 experiment, while deep learning has revolutionized the technology for contact and distance distribution prediction since its debut in 2012 CASP10 experiment. During 2018 CASP13 experiment, we enhanced our MULTICOM protein structure prediction system with three major components: contact distance prediction based on deep convolutional neural networks, contact distance-driven template-free (ab initio) modeling, and protein model ranking empowered by deep learning and contact prediction, in addition to an update of other components such as template library, sequence database, and alignment tools. Our experiment demonstrates that contact distance prediction and deep learning methods are the key reasons that MULTICOM was ranked 3rd out of all 98 predictors in both template-free and template-based protein structure modeling in CASP13. Deep convolutional neural network can utilize global information in pairwise residue-residue features such as co-evolution scores to substantially improve inter-residue contact distance prediction, which played a decisive role in correctly folding some free modeling and hard template-based modeling targets from scratch. Deep learning also successfully integrated 1D structural features, 2D contact information, and 3D structural quality scores to improve protein model quality assessment, where the contact prediction was demonstrated to consistently enhance ranking of protein models for the first time. The success of MULTICOM system in the CASP13 experiment clearly shows that protein contact distance prediction and model selection driven by powerful deep learning holds the key of solving protein structure prediction problem. However, there are still major challenges in accurately predicting protein contact distance when there are few homologous sequences to generate co-evolutionary signals, folding proteins from noisy contact distances, and ranking models of hard targets.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianqi Wu ◽  
Jian Liu ◽  
Zhiye Guo ◽  
Jie Hou ◽  
Jianlin Cheng

Abstract Protein structure prediction is an important problem in bioinformatics and has been studied for decades. However, there are still few open-source comprehensive protein structure prediction packages publicly available in the field. In this paper, we present our latest open-source protein tertiary structure prediction system - MULTICOM2, an integration of template-based modeling (TBM) and template-free modeling (FM) methods. The template-based modeling uses sequence alignment tools with deep multiple sequence alignments to search for structural templates, which are much faster and more accurate than MULTICOM1. The template-free (ab initio or de novo) modeling uses the inter-residue distances predicted by DeepDist to reconstruct tertiary structure models without using any known structure as template. In the blind CASP14 experiment, the average TM-score of the models predicted by our server predictor based on the MULTICOM2 system is 0.720 for 58 TBM (regular) domains and 0.514 for 38 FM and FM/TBM (hard) domains, indicating that MULTICOM2 is capable of predicting good tertiary structures across the board. It can predict the correct fold for 76 CASP14 domains (95% regular domains and 55% hard domains) if only one prediction is made for a domain. The success rate is increased to 3% for both regular and hard domains if five predictions are made per domain. Moreover, the prediction accuracy of the pure template-free structure modeling method on both TBM and FM targets is very close to the combination of template-based and template-free modeling methods. This demonstrates that the distance-based template-free modeling method powered by deep learning can largely replace the traditional template-based modeling method even on TBM targets that TBM methods used to dominate and therefore provides a uniform structure modeling approach to any protein. Finally, on the 38 CASP14 FM and FM/TBM hard domains, MULTICOM2 server predictors (MULTICOM-HYBRID, MULTICOM-DEEP, MULTICOM-DIST) were ranked among the top 20 automated server predictors in the CASP14 experiment. After combining multiple predictors from the same research group as one entry, MULTICOM-HYBRID was ranked no. 5. The source code of MULTICOM2 is freely available at https://github.com/multicom-toolbox/multicom/tree/multicom_v2.0.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Tianqi Wu ◽  
Jian Liu ◽  
Zhiye Guo ◽  
Jie Hou ◽  
Jianlin Cheng

AbstractProtein structure prediction is an important problem in bioinformatics and has been studied for decades. However, there are still few open-source comprehensive protein structure prediction packages publicly available in the field. In this paper, we present our latest open-source protein tertiary structure prediction system—MULTICOM2, an integration of template-based modeling (TBM) and template-free modeling (FM) methods. The template-based modeling uses sequence alignment tools with deep multiple sequence alignments to search for structural templates, which are much faster and more accurate than MULTICOM1. The template-free (ab initio or de novo) modeling uses the inter-residue distances predicted by DeepDist to reconstruct tertiary structure models without using any known structure as template. In the blind CASP14 experiment, the average TM-score of the models predicted by our server predictor based on the MULTICOM2 system is 0.720 for 58 TBM (regular) domains and 0.514 for 38 FM and FM/TBM (hard) domains, indicating that MULTICOM2 is capable of predicting good tertiary structures across the board. It can predict the correct fold for 76 CASP14 domains (95% regular domains and 55% hard domains) if only one prediction is made for a domain. The success rate is increased to 3% for both regular and hard domains if five predictions are made per domain. Moreover, the prediction accuracy of the pure template-free structure modeling method on both TBM and FM targets is very close to the combination of template-based and template-free modeling methods. This demonstrates that the distance-based template-free modeling method powered by deep learning can largely replace the traditional template-based modeling method even on TBM targets that TBM methods used to dominate and therefore provides a uniform structure modeling approach to any protein. Finally, on the 38 CASP14 FM and FM/TBM hard domains, MULTICOM2 server predictors (MULTICOM-HYBRID, MULTICOM-DEEP, MULTICOM-DIST) were ranked among the top 20 automated server predictors in the CASP14 experiment. After combining multiple predictors from the same research group as one entry, MULTICOM-HYBRID was ranked no. 5. The source code of MULTICOM2 is freely available at https://github.com/multicom-toolbox/multicom/tree/multicom_v2.0.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Mindaugas Margelevicius

A protocol ROPIUS0 for protein structure prediction and model selection is presented. At the core of the ROPIUS0 protocol is the deep learning module developed for the selection of protein structural models. It is shown that the direct use of predicted inter-residue distances may be sufficient to discriminate between correct and incorrect protein folds, considering only a small fraction of predicted distances. Having finished the latest CASP14 prediction season, a ROPIUS0 variant based on model selection ranks 13th in the category of tertiary structure prediction. Its performance is on par with top-performing automated prediction servers when tested on the CASP13 dataset. The results suggest ways to improve searching for structurally similar and homologous proteins without considerably increasing speed.


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