DLSSAffinity: protein-ligand binding affinity prediction via a deep learning model

The association between estrogenic activity evolution and the formation of different products during the photochemical transformation of parabens in water

Photochemical transformation is a critical factor influencing the environmental fate of pharmaceutical and personal care products in aquatic ecosystems. However, the relationship between toxicity evolution and the formation of various transformation products has been seldom explored. This study investigates the behavior and changes in estrogenic activity during the photochemical transformation of a series of typical endocrine-disrupting parabens (PBs), focusing on the effects of increasing alkyl-chain length (MPB, EPB, PPB and BPB). Based on MS/MS analysis, four types of transformation products were identified: (1) p-hydroxybenzoic acid (HB), which exhibits no estrogenic activity; (2) hydroxylated products (OH-PBs); (3) dimer products formed between HB and PBs (HB-PBs); and (4) dimer products formed from identical PBs (PBs-PBs), comprising three distinct isomers. In the absence of standard sample, OH-PBs were synthesized and their estrogenic activity was evaluated using a yeast two-hybrid reporter assay. The EC50 values were determined to be <1 × 10-3 M for OH-MPB, 2.05 × 10-4 M for OH-EPB, 5.05 × 10-5 M for OH-PPB, and 1.89 × 10-5 M for OH-BPB. These indicate that the estrogenic activity of OH-PBs is one order of magnitude lower than that of the corresponding PBs. Both HB-PBs and the three isomers of PBs-PBs exhibited significantly higher estrogenic activities than their corresponding parent compounds, increasing 9 - 14 and 32 - 184 times, respectively, based on theoretical calculations. Among the three PBs-PBs isomers, the highest estrogenic activity was observed in the ether dimer, followed by the biphenyl dimers. Consistent with the parent compounds, the estrogenic activities of OH-PBs, HB-PBs, and PBs-PBs increased with the length of the alkyl-chain. The estrogenic activity of MPB and EPB followed an overall downward trend during the photochemical transformation, whereas PPB and BPB remained stable initially before declining rapidly. This behavior was associated with the contributions of toxic transformation products. These findings elucidate the relationship between molecular structure, transformation products, and estrogenic activity, highlighting the importance of understanding estrogenic activity evolution during the photochemical transformation of PBs.

PLAGCA: Predicting protein-ligand binding affinity with the graph cross-attention mechanism

Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity plays a crucial role in drug discovery. However, determining the binding affinity of protein-ligands through biological experimental approaches is both time-consuming and expensive. Although some computational methods have been developed to predict protein-ligands binding affinity, most existing methods extract the global features of proteins and ligands through separate encoders, without considering to extract the local pocket interaction features of protein-ligand complexes, resulting in the limited prediction accuracy. In this work, we proposed a novel Protein-Ligand binding Affinity prediction method (named PLAGCA) by introducing Graph Cross-Attention mechanism to learn the local three-dimensional (3D) features of protein-ligand pockets, and integrating the global sequence/string features and local graph interaction features of protein-ligand complexes. PLAGCA uses sequence encoding and self-attention to extract the protein/ligand global features from protein FASTA sequences/ligand SMILES strings, adopts graph neural network and cross-attention to extract the protein-ligand local interaction features from the molecular structures of protein binding pockets and ligands. All these features are concatenated and input into a multi-layer perceptron (MLP) for predicting the protein-ligand binding affinity. The experimental results show that our PLAGCA outperforms other state-of-the-art computational methods, and it can effectively predict protein-ligand binding affinity with superior generalization capability. PLAGCA can capture the critical functional residues that are important contribution to the protein-ligand binding.

T-ALPHA: A Hierarchical Transformer-Based Deep Neural Network for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction with Uncertainty-Aware Self-Learning for Protein-Specific Alignment

There is significant interest in targeting disease-causing proteins with small molecule inhibitors to restore healthy cellular states. The ability to accurately predict the binding affinity of small molecules to a protein target in silico enables the rapid identification of candidate inhibitors and facilitates the optimization of on-target potency. In this work, we present T-ALPHA, a novel deep learning model that enhances protein-ligand binding affinity prediction by integrating multimodal feature representations within a hierarchical transformer framework to capture information critical to accurately predicting binding affinity. T-ALPHA outperforms all existing models reported in the literature on multiple benchmarks designed to evaluate protein-ligand binding affinity scoring functions. Remarkably, T-ALPHA maintains state-of-the-art performance when utilizing predicted structures rather than crystal structures, a powerful capability in real-world drug discovery applications where experimentally determined structures are often unavailable or incomplete. Additionally, we present an uncertainty-aware self-learning method for protein-specific alignment that does not require additional experimental data and demonstrate that it improves T-ALPHA's ability to rank compounds by binding affinity to biologically significant targets such as the SARS-CoV-2 main protease and the epidermal growth factor receptor. To facilitate implementation of T-ALPHA and reproducibility of all results presented in this paper, we made all of our software available at https://github.com/gregory-kyro/T-ALPHA.

Modern machine learning methods for protein property prediction

Recent progress and development of artificial intelligence and machine learning (AI/ML) techniques have enabled addressing complex biomolecular problems. AI/ML models learn the underlying distribution of data they are trained on and when exposed to new inputs, they make predictions based on patterns and relationships previously observed in the training set. Further, generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) can be used to accurately generate protein structure or sequence from specific selected properties. This review specifically focuses on the applications of AI/ML in predicting important functional properties of proteins, and the potential prospects of reverse-engineering in depicting the sequence and structure, from available protein-property information.

ERL-ProLiGraph: Enhanced representation learning on protein-ligand graph structured data for binding affinity prediction

Predicting Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity (PLBA) is pivotal in drug development, as accurate estimations of PLBA expedite the identification of promising drug candidates for specific targets, thereby accelerating the drug discovery process. Despite substantial advancements in PLBA prediction, developing an efficient and more accurate method remains non-trivial. Unlike previous computer-aid PLBA studies which primarily using ligand SMILES and protein sequences represented as strings, this research introduces a Deep Learning-based method, the Enhanced Representation Learning on Protein-Ligand Graph Structured data for Binding Affinity Prediction (ERL-ProLiGraph). The unique aspect of this method is the use of graph representations for both proteins and ligands, intending to learn structural information continued from both to enhance the accuracy of PLBA predictions. In these graphs, nodes represent atomic structures, while edges depict chemical bonds and spatial relationship. The proposed model, leveraging deep-learning algorithms, effectively learns to correlate these graphical representations with binding affinities. This graph-based representations approach enhances the model's ability to capture the complex molecular interactions critical in PLBA. This work represents a promising advancement in computational techniques for protein-ligand binding prediction, offering a potential path toward more efficient and accurate predictions in drug development. Comparative analysis indicates that the proposed ERL-ProLiGraph outperforms previous models, showcasing notable efficacy and providing a more suitable approach for accurate PLBA predictions.

Predicting Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Using Fusion Model of Spatial-Temporal Graph Neural Network and 3D Structure-Based Complex Graph

The investigation of molecular interactions between ligands and their target molecules is becoming more significant as protein structure data continues to develop. In this study, we introduce PLA-STGCNnet, a deep fusion spatial-temporal graph neural network designed to study protein-ligand interactions based on the 3D structural data of protein-ligand complexes. Unlike 1D protein sequences or 2D ligand graphs, the 3D graph representation offers a more precise portrayal of the complex interactions between proteins and ligands. Research studies have shown that our fusion model, PLA-STGCNnet, outperforms individual algorithms in accurately predicting binding affinity. The advantage of a fusion model is the ability to fully combine the advantages of multiple different models and improve overall performance by combining their features and outputs. Our fusion model shows satisfactory performance on different data sets, which proves its generalization ability and stability. The fusion-based model showed good performance in protein-ligand affinity prediction, and we successfully applied the model to drug screening. Our research underscores the promise of fusion spatial-temporal graph neural networks in addressing complex challenges in protein-ligand affinity prediction. The Python scripts for implementing various model components are accessible at https://github.com/ligaili01/PLA-STGCN.

Predicting Affinity Through Homology (PATH): Interpretable Binding Affinity Prediction with Persistent Homology

Accurate binding affinity prediction is crucial to structure-based drug design. Recent work used computational topology to obtain an effective representation of protein-ligand interactions. While algorithms using algebraic topology have proven useful in predicting properties of biomolecules, previous algorithms employed uninterpretable machine learning models which failed to explain the underlying geometric and topological features that drive accurate binding affinity prediction. Moreover, they had high computational complexity which made them intractable for large proteins. We present the fastest known algorithm to compute persistent homology features for protein-ligand complexes using opposition distance, with a runtime that is independent of the protein size. Then, we exploit these features in a novel, interpretable algorithm to predict protein-ligand binding affinity. Our algorithm achieves interpretability through an effective embedding of distances across bipartite matchings of the protein and ligand atoms into real-valued functions by summing Gaussians centered at features constructed by persistent homology. We name these functions internuclear persistent contours (IPCs) . Next, we introduce persistence fingerprints , a vector with 10 components that sketches the distances of different bipartite matching between protein and ligand atoms, refined from IPCs. Let the number of protein atoms in the protein-ligand complex be n , number of ligand atoms be m , and ω ≈ 2.4 be the matrix multiplication exponent. We show that for any 0 < ε < 1, after an 𝒪 ( mn log( mn )) preprocessing procedure, we can compute an ε -accurate approximation to the persistence fingerprint in 𝒪 ( m log 6 ω ( m/ε )) time, independent of protein size. This is an improvement in time complexity by a factor of 𝒪 (( m + n ) 3 ) over any previous binding affinity prediction that uses persistent homology. We show that the representational power of persistence fingerprint generalizes to protein-ligand binding datasets beyond the training dataset. Then, we introduce PATH , Predicting Affinity Through Homology, a two-part algorithm consisting of PATH + and PATH - . PATH + is an interpretable, small ensemble of shallow regression trees for binding affinity prediction from persistence fingerprints. We show that despite using 1,400-fold fewer features, PATH + has comparable performance to a previous state-of-the-art binding affinity prediction algorithm that uses persistent homology. Moreover, PATH + has the advantage of being interpretable. We visualize the features captured by persistence fingerprint for variant HIV-1 protease complexes and show that persistence fingerprint captures binding-relevant structural mutations. PATH - , in turn, uses regression trees over IPCs to differentiate between binding and decoy complexes. Finally, we benchmarked PATH versus established binding affinity prediction algorithms spanning physics-based, knowledge-based, and deep learning methods, revealing that PATH has comparable or better performance with less overfitting, compared to these state-of-the-art methods. The source code for PATH is released open-source as part of the osprey protein design software package.

Ensembling methods for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction

Protein-ligand binding affinity prediction is a key element of computer-aided drug discovery. Most of the existing deep learning methods for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction utilize single models and suffer from low accuracy and generalization capability. In this paper, we train 13 deep learning models from combinations of 5 input features. Then, we explore all possible ensembles of the trained models to find the best ensembles. Our deep learning models use cross-attention and self-attention layers to extract short and long-range interactions. Our method is named Ensemble Binding Affinity (EBA). EBA extracts information from various models using different combinations of input features, such as simple 1D sequential and structural features of the protein-ligand complexes rather than 3D complex features. EBA is implemented to accurately predict the binding affinity of a protein-ligand complex. One of our ensembles achieves the highest Pearson correlation coefficient (R) value of 0.914 and the lowest root mean square error (RMSE) value of 0.957 on the well-known benchmark test set CASF2016. Our ensembles show significant improvements of more than 15% in R-value and 19% in RMSE on both well-known benchmark CSAR-HiQ test sets over the second-best predictor named CAPLA. Furthermore, the superior performance of the ensembles across all metrics compared to existing state-of-the-art protein-ligand binding affinity prediction methods on all five benchmark test datasets demonstrates the effectiveness and robustness of our approach. Therefore, our approach to improving binding affinity prediction between proteins and ligands can contribute to improving the success rate of potential drugs and accelerate the drug development process.

Advances and Challenges in Scoring Functions for RNA-Protein Complex Structure Prediction

RNA-protein complexes play a crucial role in cellular functions, providing insights into cellular mechanisms and potential therapeutic targets. However, experimental determination of these complex structures is often time-consuming and resource-intensive, and it rarely yields high-resolution data. Many computational approaches have been developed to predict RNA-protein complex structures in recent years. Despite these advances, achieving accurate and high-resolution predictions remains a formidable challenge, primarily due to the limitations inherent in current RNA-protein scoring functions. These scoring functions are critical tools for evaluating and interpreting RNA-protein interactions. This review comprehensively explores the latest advancements in scoring functions for RNA-protein docking, delving into the fundamental principles underlying various approaches, including coarse-grained knowledge-based, all-atom knowledge-based, and machine-learning-based methods. We critically evaluate the strengths and limitations of existing scoring functions, providing a detailed performance assessment. Considering the significant progress demonstrated by machine learning techniques, we discuss emerging trends and propose future research directions to enhance the accuracy and efficiency of scoring functions in RNA-protein complex prediction. We aim to inspire the development of more sophisticated and reliable computational tools in this rapidly evolving field.

DEAttentionDTA: protein-ligand binding affinity prediction based on dynamic embedding and self-attention

MOTIVATION

Predicting protein-ligand binding affinity is crucial in new drug discovery and development. However, most existing models rely on acquiring 3D structures of elusive proteins. Combining amino acid sequences with ligand sequences and better highlighting active sites are also significant challenges.

RESULTS

We propose an innovative neural network model called DEAttentionDTA, based on dynamic word embeddings and a self-attention mechanism, for predicting protein-ligand binding affinity. DEAttentionDTA takes the 1D sequence information of proteins as input, including the global sequence features of amino acids, local features of the active pocket site, and linear representation information of the ligand molecule in the SMILE format. These three linear sequences are fed into a dynamic word-embedding layer based on a 1D convolutional neural network for embedding encoding and are correlated through a self-attention mechanism. The output affinity prediction values are generated using a linear layer. We compared DEAttentionDTA with various mainstream tools and achieved significantly superior results on the same dataset. We then assessed the performance of this model in the p38 protein family.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

The resource codes are available at https://github.com/whatamazing1/DEAttentionDTA.

Recent advances in computational and experimental protein-ligand affinity determination techniques

INTRODUCTION

Modern drug discovery revolves around designing ligands that target the chosen biomolecule, typically proteins. For this, the evaluation of affinities of putative ligands is crucial. This has given rise to a multitude of dedicated computational and experimental methods that are constantly being developed and improved.

AREAS COVERED

In this review, the authors reassess both the industry mainstays and the newest trends among the methods for protein - small-molecule affinity determination. They discuss both computational affinity predictions and experimental techniques, describing their basic principles, main limitations, and advantages. Together, this serves as initial guide to the currently most popular and cutting-edge ligand-binding assays employed in rational drug design.

EXPERT OPINION

The affinity determination methods continue to develop toward miniaturization, high-throughput, and in-cell application. Moreover, the availability of data analysis tools has been constantly increasing. Nevertheless, cross-verification of data using at least two different techniques and careful result interpretation remain of utmost importance.

Distance plus attention for binding affinity prediction

Protein-ligand binding affinity plays a pivotal role in drug development, particularly in identifying potential ligands for target disease-related proteins. Accurate affinity predictions can significantly reduce both the time and cost involved in drug development. However, highly precise affinity prediction remains a research challenge. A key to improve affinity prediction is to capture interactions between proteins and ligands effectively. Existing deep-learning-based computational approaches use 3D grids, 4D tensors, molecular graphs, or proximity-based adjacency matrices, which are either resource-intensive or do not directly represent potential interactions. In this paper, we propose atomic-level distance features and attention mechanisms to capture better specific protein-ligand interactions based on donor-acceptor relations, hydrophobicity, and π -stacking atoms. We argue that distances encompass both short-range direct and long-range indirect interaction effects while attention mechanisms capture levels of interaction effects. On the very well-known CASF-2016 dataset, our proposed method, named Distance plus Attention for Affinity Prediction (DAAP), significantly outperforms existing methods by achieving Correlation Coefficient (R) 0.909, Root Mean Squared Error (RMSE) 0.987, Mean Absolute Error (MAE) 0.745, Standard Deviation (SD) 0.988, and Concordance Index (CI) 0.876. The proposed method also shows substantial improvement, around 2% to 37%, on five other benchmark datasets. The program and data are publicly available on the website https://gitlab.com/mahnewton/daap. Scientific Contribution StatementThis study innovatively introduces distance-based features to predict protein-ligand binding affinity, capitalizing on unique molecular interactions. Furthermore, the incorporation of protein sequence features of specific residues enhances the model's proficiency in capturing intricate binding patterns. The predictive capabilities are further strengthened through the use of a deep learning architecture with attention mechanisms, and an ensemble approach, averaging the outputs of five models, is implemented to ensure robust and reliable predictions.

SadNet: a novel multimodal fusion network for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction

Protein-ligand binding affinity prediction plays an important role in the field of drug discovery. Existing deep learning-based approaches have significantly improved the efficiency of protein-ligand binding affinity prediction through their excellent inductive bias capability. However, these methods only focus on fragmented three-dimensional data, which truncates the integrity of pocket data, leading to the neglect of potential long-range interactions. In this paper, we propose a dual-stream framework, with amino acid sequence assisting the atomic data fusion for graph neural network (termed SadNet), to fuse both 3D atomic data and sequence data for more accurate prediction results. In detail, SadNet consists of a pocket module and a sequence module. The sequence module expands the "receptive field" of the pocket module through a mid-term virtual node fusion. To better integrate sequence-level information from the sequence module and 3D structural information from the pocket module, we incorporate structural information for each amino acid within the sequence module. Besides, to better understand the intrinsic relationship between sequences and 3D atomic information, our SadNet utilizes information stacking from both the early stage and later stage. Experimental results on publicly available benchmark datasets demonstrate the superiority of the proposed dual-stream approach over the state-of-the-art alternatives. The code of this work is available online at https://github.com/wardhong/SadNet.

MMDTA: A Multimodal Deep Model for Drug-Target Affinity with a Hybrid Fusion Strategy

The prediction of the drug-target affinity (DTA) plays an important role in evaluating molecular druggability. Although deep learning-based models for DTA prediction have been extensively attempted, there are rare reports on multimodal models that leverage various fusion strategies to exploit heterogeneous information from multiple different modalities of drugs and targets. In this study, we proposed a multimodal deep model named MMDTA, which integrated the heterogeneous information from various modalities of drugs and targets using a hybrid fusion strategy to enhance DTA prediction. To achieve this, MMDTA first employed convolutional neural networks (CNNs) and graph convolutional networks (GCNs) to extract diverse heterogeneous information from the sequences and structures of drugs and targets. It then utilized a hybrid fusion strategy to combine and complement the extracted heterogeneous information, resulting in the fused modal information for predicting drug-target affinity through the fully connected (FC) layers. Experimental results demonstrated that MMDTA outperformed the competitive state-of-the-art deep learning models on the widely used benchmark data sets, particularly with a significantly improved key evaluation metric, Root Mean Square Error (RMSE). Furthermore, MMDTA exhibited excellent generalization and practical application performance on multiple different data sets. These findings highlighted MMDTA's accuracy and reliability in predicting the drug-target binding affinity. For researchers interested in the source data and code, they are accessible at http://github.com/dldxzx/MMDTA.

PLANET: A Multi-objective Graph Neural Network Model for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

Predicting protein-ligand binding affinity is a central issue in drug design. Various deep learning models have been published in recent years, where many of them rely on 3D protein-ligand complex structures as input and tend to focus on the single task of reproducing binding affinity. In this study, we have developed a graph neural network model called PLANET (Protein-Ligand Affinity prediction NETwork). This model takes the graph-represented 3D structure of the binding pocket on the target protein and the 2D chemical structure of the ligand molecule as input. It was trained through a multi-objective process with three related tasks, including deriving the protein-ligand binding affinity, protein-ligand contact map, and ligand distance matrix. Besides the protein-ligand complexes with known binding affinity data retrieved from the PDBbind database, a large number of non-binder decoys were also added to the training data for deriving the final model of PLANET. When tested on the CASF-2016 benchmark, PLANET exhibited a scoring power comparable to the best result yielded by other deep learning models as well as a reasonable ranking power and docking power. In virtual screening trials conducted on the DUD-E benchmark, PLANET's performance was notably better than several deep learning and machine learning models. As on the LIT-PCBA benchmark, PLANET achieved comparable accuracy as the conventional docking program Glide, but it only spent less than 1% of Glide's computation time to finish the same job because PLANET did not need exhaustive conformational sampling. Considering the decent accuracy and efficiency of PLANET in binding affinity prediction, it may become a useful tool for conducting large-scale virtual screening.

Prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity via deep learning models

Accurately predicting the binding affinity between proteins and ligands is crucial in drug screening and optimization, but it is still a challenge in computer-aided drug design. The recent success of AlphaFold2 in predicting protein structures has brought new hope for deep learning (DL) models to accurately predict protein-ligand binding affinity. However, the current DL models still face limitations due to the low-quality database, inaccurate input representation and inappropriate model architecture. In this work, we review the computational methods, specifically DL-based models, used to predict protein-ligand binding affinity. We start with a brief introduction to protein-ligand binding affinity and the traditional computational methods used to calculate them. We then introduce the basic principles of DL models for predicting protein-ligand binding affinity. Next, we review the commonly used databases, input representations and DL models in this field. Finally, we discuss the potential challenges and future work in accurately predicting protein-ligand binding affinity via DL models.

Ensemble of local and global information for Protein-Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

Accurately predicting protein-ligand binding affinities is crucial for determining molecular properties and understanding their physical effects. Neural networks and transformers are the predominant methods for sequence modeling, and both have been successfully applied independently for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction. As local and global information of molecules are vital for protein-ligand binding affinity prediction, we aim to combine bi-directional gated recurrent unit (BiGRU) and convolutional neural network (CNN) to effectively capture both local and global molecular information. Additionally, attention mechanisms can be incorporated to automatically learn and adjust the level of attention given to local and global information, thereby enhancing the performance of the model. To achieve this, we propose the PLAsformer approach, which encodes local and global information of molecules using 3DCNN and BiGRU with attention mechanism, respectively. This approach enhances the model's ability to encode comprehensive local and global molecular information. PLAsformer achieved a Pearson's correlation coefficient of 0.812 and a Root Mean Square Error (RMSE) of 1.284 when comparing experimental and predicted affinity on the PDBBind-2016 dataset. These results surpass the current state-of-the-art methods for binding affinity prediction. The high accuracy of PLAsformer's predictive performance, along with its excellent generalization ability, is clearly demonstrated by these findings.

Iterative Knowledge-Based Scoring Function for Protein-Ligand Interactions by Considering Binding Affinity Information

Scoring functions for protein-ligand interactions play a critical role in structure-based drug design. Owing to the good balance between general applicability and computational efficiency, knowledge-based scoring functions have obtained significant advancements and achieved many successes. Nevertheless, knowledge-based scoring functions face a challenge in utilizing the experimental affinity data and thus may not perform well in binding affinity prediction. Addressing the challenge, we have proposed an improved version of the iterative knowledge-based scoring function ITScore by considering binding affinity information, which is referred to as ITScoreAff, based on a large training set of 6216 protein-ligand complexes with both structures and affinity data. ITScoreAff was extensively evaluated and compared with ITScore, 33 traditional, and 6 machine learning scoring functions in terms of docking power, ranking power, and screening power on the independent CASF-2016 benchmark. It was shown that ITScoreAff obtained an overall better performance than the other 40 scoring functions and gave an average success rate of 85.3% in docking power, a correlation coefficient of 0.723 in scoring power, and an average rank correlation coefficient of 0.668 in ranking power. In addition, ITScoreAff also achieved the overall best screening power when the top 10% of the ranked database were considered. These results demonstrated the robustness of ITScoreAff and its improvement over existing scoring functions.

Ligand binding affinity prediction with fusion of graph neural networks and 3D structure-based complex graph

Accurate prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is pivotal for drug design and discovery. Here, we proposed a novel deep fusion graph neural networks framework named FGNN to learn the protein-ligand interactions from the 3D structures of protein-ligand complexes. Unlike 1D sequences for proteins or 2D graphs for ligands, the 3D graph of protein-ligand complex enables the more accurate representations of the protein-ligand interactions. Benchmark studies have shown that our fusion models FGNN can achieve more accurate prediction of binding affinity than any individual algorithm. The advantages of fusion strategies have been demonstrated in terms of expressive power of data, learning efficiency and model interpretability. Our fusion models show satisfactory performances on diverse data sets, demonstrating their generalization ability. Given the good performances in both binding affinity prediction and virtual screening, our fusion models are expected to be practically applied for drug screening and design. Our work highlights the potential of the fusion graph neural network algorithm in solving complex prediction problems in computational biology and chemistry. The fusion graph neural networks (FGNN) model is freely available in https://github.com/LinaDongXMU/FGNN.

CAPLA: improved prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity by a deep learning approach based on a cross-attention mechanism

MOTIVATION

Accurate and rapid prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity is a great challenge currently encountered in drug discovery. Recent advances have manifested a promising alternative in applying deep learning-based computational approaches for accurately quantifying binding affinity. The structure complementarity between protein-binding pocket and ligand has a great effect on the binding strength between a protein and a ligand, but most of existing deep learning approaches usually extracted the features of pocket and ligand by these two detached modules.

RESULTS

In this work, a new deep learning approach based on the cross-attention mechanism named CAPLA was developed for improved prediction of protein-ligand binding affinity by learning features from sequence-level information of both protein and ligand. Specifically, CAPLA employs the cross-attention mechanism to capture the mutual effect of protein-binding pocket and ligand. We evaluated the performance of our proposed CAPLA on comprehensive benchmarking experiments on binding affinity prediction, demonstrating the superior performance of CAPLA over state-of-the-art baseline approaches. Moreover, we provided the interpretability for CAPLA to uncover critical functional residues that contribute most to the binding affinity through the analysis of the attention scores generated by the cross-attention mechanism. Consequently, these results indicate that CAPLA is an effective approach for binding affinity prediction and may contribute to useful help for further consequent applications.

AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION

The source code of the method along with trained models is freely available at https://github.com/lennylv/CAPLA.

SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

Prediction of allosteric druggable pockets of cyclin-dependent kinases

Cyclin-dependent kinase (Cdk) proteins play crucial roles in the cell cycle progression and are thus attractive drug targets for therapy against such aberrant cell cycle processes as cancer. Since most of the available Cdk inhibitors target the highly conserved catalytic ATP pocket and their lack of specificity often lead to side effects, it is imperative to identify and characterize less conserved non-catalytic pockets capable of interfering with the kinase activity allosterically. However, a systematic analysis of these allosteric druggable pockets is still in its infancy. Here, we summarize the existing Cdk pockets and their selectivity. Then, we outline a network-based pocket prediction approach (NetPocket) and illustrate its utility for systematically identifying the allosteric druggable pockets with case studies. Finally, we discuss potential future directions and their challenges.