1
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Xiong D, U K, Sun J, Cribbs AP. PLMC: Language Model of Protein Sequences Enhances Protein Crystallization Prediction. Interdiscip Sci 2024:10.1007/s12539-024-00639-6. [PMID: 39155325 DOI: 10.1007/s12539-024-00639-6] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/02/2024] [Revised: 05/13/2024] [Accepted: 05/21/2024] [Indexed: 08/20/2024]
Abstract
X-ray diffraction crystallography has been most widely used for protein three-dimensional (3D) structure determination for which whether proteins are crystallizable is a central prerequisite. Yet, there are a number of procedures during protein crystallization, including protein material production, purification, and crystal production, which take turns affecting the crystallization outcome. Due to the expensive and laborious nature of this multi-stage process, various computational tools have been developed to predict protein crystallization propensity, which is then used to guide the experimental determination. In this study, we presented a novel deep learning framework, PLMC, to improve multi-stage protein crystallization propensity prediction by leveraging a pre-trained protein language model. To effectively train PLMC, two groups of features of each protein were integrated into a more comprehensive representation, including protein language embeddings from the large-scale protein sequence database and a handcrafted feature set consisting of physicochemical, sequence-based and disordered-related information. These features were further separately embedded for refinement, and then concatenated for the final prediction. Notably, our extensive benchmarking tests demonstrate that PLMC greatly outperforms other state-of-the-art methods by achieving AUC scores of 0.773, 0.893, and 0.913, respectively, at the aforementioned individual stages, and 0.982 at the final crystallization stage. Furthermore, PLMC is shown to be superior for predicting the crystallization of both globular and membrane proteins, as demonstrated by an AUC score of 0.991 for the latter. These results suggest the significant potential of PLMC in assisting researchers with the experimental design of crystallizable protein variants.
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Affiliation(s)
- Dapeng Xiong
- Department of Computational Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, 14853, USA.
- Weill Institute for Cell and Molecular Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, 14853, USA.
| | - Kaicheng U
- Department of Computational Biology, Cornell University, Ithaca, 14853, USA
| | - Jianfeng Sun
- Botnar Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX3 7LD, UK.
| | - Adam P Cribbs
- Botnar Research Centre, University of Oxford, Oxford, OX3 7LD, UK
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2
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Jang YJ, Qin QQ, Huang SY, Peter ATJ, Ding XM, Kornmann B. Accurate prediction of protein function using statistics-informed graph networks. Nat Commun 2024; 15:6601. [PMID: 39097570 PMCID: PMC11297950 DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-50955-0] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/17/2023] [Accepted: 07/15/2024] [Indexed: 08/05/2024] Open
Abstract
Understanding protein function is pivotal in comprehending the intricate mechanisms that underlie many crucial biological activities, with far-reaching implications in the fields of medicine, biotechnology, and drug development. However, more than 200 million proteins remain uncharacterized, and computational efforts heavily rely on protein structural information to predict annotations of varying quality. Here, we present a method that utilizes statistics-informed graph networks to predict protein functions solely from its sequence. Our method inherently characterizes evolutionary signatures, allowing for a quantitative assessment of the significance of residues that carry out specific functions. PhiGnet not only demonstrates superior performance compared to alternative approaches but also narrows the sequence-function gap, even in the absence of structural information. Our findings indicate that applying deep learning to evolutionary data can highlight functional sites at the residue level, providing valuable support for interpreting both existing properties and new functionalities of proteins in research and biomedicine.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yaan J Jang
- Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
- AmoAi Technologies, Oxford, UK.
| | - Qi-Qi Qin
- AmoAi Technologies, Oxford, UK
- School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
| | - Si-Yu Huang
- AmoAi Technologies, Oxford, UK
- Oxford Martin School, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK
- School of Systems Science, Beijing Normal University, Beijing, China
| | | | - Xue-Ming Ding
- School of Optical-Electrical and Computer Engineering, University of Shanghai for Science and Technology, Shanghai, China
| | - Benoît Kornmann
- Department of Biochemistry, University of Oxford, Oxford, UK.
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3
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Boadu F, Lee A, Cheng J. Deep learning methods for protein function prediction. Proteomics 2024:e2300471. [PMID: 38996351 DOI: 10.1002/pmic.202300471] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/26/2024] [Revised: 06/15/2024] [Accepted: 06/18/2024] [Indexed: 07/14/2024]
Abstract
Predicting protein function from protein sequence, structure, interaction, and other relevant information is important for generating hypotheses for biological experiments and studying biological systems, and therefore has been a major challenge in protein bioinformatics. Numerous computational methods had been developed to advance protein function prediction gradually in the last two decades. Particularly, in the recent years, leveraging the revolutionary advances in artificial intelligence (AI), more and more deep learning methods have been developed to improve protein function prediction at a faster pace. Here, we provide an in-depth review of the recent developments of deep learning methods for protein function prediction. We summarize the significant advances in the field, identify several remaining major challenges to be tackled, and suggest some potential directions to explore. The data sources and evaluation metrics widely used in protein function prediction are also discussed to assist the machine learning, AI, and bioinformatics communities to develop more cutting-edge methods to advance protein function prediction.
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Affiliation(s)
- Frimpong Boadu
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA
| | - Ahhyun Lee
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA
| | - Jianlin Cheng
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, Missouri, USA
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4
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Yuan Q, Tian C, Song Y, Ou P, Zhu M, Zhao H, Yang Y. GPSFun: geometry-aware protein sequence function predictions with language models. Nucleic Acids Res 2024; 52:W248-W255. [PMID: 38738636 PMCID: PMC11223820 DOI: 10.1093/nar/gkae381] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/07/2024] [Revised: 04/22/2024] [Accepted: 04/26/2024] [Indexed: 05/14/2024] Open
Abstract
Knowledge of protein function is essential for elucidating disease mechanisms and discovering new drug targets. However, there is a widening gap between the exponential growth of protein sequences and their limited function annotations. In our prior studies, we have developed a series of methods including GraphPPIS, GraphSite, LMetalSite and SPROF-GO for protein function annotations at residue or protein level. To further enhance their applicability and performance, we now present GPSFun, a versatile web server for Geometry-aware Protein Sequence Function annotations, which equips our previous tools with language models and geometric deep learning. Specifically, GPSFun employs large language models to efficiently predict 3D conformations of the input protein sequences and extract informative sequence embeddings. Subsequently, geometric graph neural networks are utilized to capture the sequence and structure patterns in the protein graphs, facilitating various downstream predictions including protein-ligand binding sites, gene ontologies, subcellular locations and protein solubility. Notably, GPSFun achieves superior performance to state-of-the-art methods across diverse tasks without requiring multiple sequence alignments or experimental protein structures. GPSFun is freely available to all users at https://bio-web1.nscc-gz.cn/app/GPSFun with user-friendly interfaces and rich visualizations.
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Affiliation(s)
- Qianmu Yuan
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510000, China
| | - Chong Tian
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510000, China
| | - Yidong Song
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510000, China
| | - Peihua Ou
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510000, China
| | - Mingming Zhu
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510000, China
| | - Huiying Zhao
- Sun Yat-sen Memorial Hospital, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510000, China
| | - Yuedong Yang
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou, Guangdong 510000, China
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5
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Zhapa-Camacho F, Tang Z, Kulmanov M, Hoehndorf R. Predicting protein functions using positive-unlabeled ranking with ontology-based priors. Bioinformatics 2024; 40:i401-i409. [PMID: 38940168 PMCID: PMC11211813 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btae237] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 06/29/2024] Open
Abstract
Automated protein function prediction is a crucial and widely studied problem in bioinformatics. Computationally, protein function is a multilabel classification problem where only positive samples are defined and there is a large number of unlabeled annotations. Most existing methods rely on the assumption that the unlabeled set of protein function annotations are negatives, inducing the false negative issue, where potential positive samples are trained as negatives. We introduce a novel approach named PU-GO, wherein we address function prediction as a positive-unlabeled ranking problem. We apply empirical risk minimization, i.e. we minimize the classification risk of a classifier where class priors are obtained from the Gene Ontology hierarchical structure. We show that our approach is more robust than other state-of-the-art methods on similarity-based and time-based benchmark datasets. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION Data and code are available at https://github.com/bio-ontology-research-group/PU-GO.
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Affiliation(s)
- Fernando Zhapa-Camacho
- Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
- Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences & Engineering Division (CEMSE), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
| | - Zhenwei Tang
- Department of Computer Science, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON M5S 1A1, Canada
| | - Maxat Kulmanov
- Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
- Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences & Engineering Division (CEMSE), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
- SDAIA-KAUST Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
| | - Robert Hoehndorf
- Computational Bioscience Research Center (CBRC), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
- Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences & Engineering Division (CEMSE), King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
- SDAIA-KAUST Center of Excellence in Data Science and Artificial Intelligence, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Thuwal, 23955-6900, Saudi Arabia
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6
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Lin B, Luo X, Liu Y, Jin X. A comprehensive review and comparison of existing computational methods for protein function prediction. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae289. [PMID: 39003530 PMCID: PMC11246557 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae289] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/02/2024] [Revised: 05/18/2024] [Indexed: 07/15/2024] Open
Abstract
Protein function prediction is critical for understanding the cellular physiological and biochemical processes, and it opens up new possibilities for advancements in fields such as disease research and drug discovery. During the past decades, with the exponential growth of protein sequence data, many computational methods for predicting protein function have been proposed. Therefore, a systematic review and comparison of these methods are necessary. In this study, we divide these methods into four different categories, including sequence-based methods, 3D structure-based methods, PPI network-based methods and hybrid information-based methods. Furthermore, their advantages and disadvantages are discussed, and then their performance is comprehensively evaluated and compared. Finally, we discuss the challenges and opportunities present in this field.
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Affiliation(s)
- Baohui Lin
- College of Big Data and Internet, Shenzhen Technology University, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518118, China
| | - Xiaoling Luo
- Guangdong Provincial Key Laboratory of Novel Security Intelligence Technologies, Shenzhen, Guangdong, China
- College of Computer Science and Software Engineering, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518061, China
| | - Yumeng Liu
- College of Big Data and Internet, Shenzhen Technology University, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518118, China
| | - Xiaopeng Jin
- College of Big Data and Internet, Shenzhen Technology University, Shenzhen, Guangdong 518118, China
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7
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Zhang C, Freddolino L. A large-scale assessment of sequence database search tools for homology-based protein function prediction. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae349. [PMID: 39038936 PMCID: PMC11262835 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae349] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 03/04/2024] [Revised: 06/03/2024] [Accepted: 07/05/2024] [Indexed: 07/24/2024] Open
Abstract
Sequence database searches followed by homology-based function transfer form one of the oldest and most popular approaches for predicting protein functions, such as Gene Ontology (GO) terms. These searches are also a critical component in most state-of-the-art machine learning and deep learning-based protein function predictors. Although sequence search tools are the basis of homology-based protein function prediction, previous studies have scarcely explored how to select the optimal sequence search tools and configure their parameters to achieve the best function prediction. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of using different options from among popular search tools, as well as the impacts of search parameters, on protein function prediction. When predicting GO terms on a large benchmark dataset, we found that BLASTp and MMseqs2 consistently exceed the performance of other tools, including DIAMOND-one of the most popular tools for function prediction-under default search parameters. However, with the correct parameter settings, DIAMOND can perform comparably to BLASTp and MMseqs2 in function prediction. Additionally, we developed a new scoring function to derive GO prediction from homologous hits that consistently outperform previously proposed scoring functions. These findings enable the improvement of almost all protein function prediction algorithms with a few easily implementable changes in their sequence homolog-based component. This study emphasizes the critical role of search parameter settings in homology-based function transfer and should have an important contribution to the development of future protein function prediction algorithms.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chengxin Zhang
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Department of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan, 100 Washtenaw Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
| | - Lydia Freddolino
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, Department of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan, 100 Washtenaw Avenue, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, United States
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8
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Yuan Q, Tian C, Yang Y. Genome-scale annotation of protein binding sites via language model and geometric deep learning. eLife 2024; 13:RP93695. [PMID: 38630609 PMCID: PMC11023698 DOI: 10.7554/elife.93695] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 04/19/2024] Open
Abstract
Revealing protein binding sites with other molecules, such as nucleic acids, peptides, or small ligands, sheds light on disease mechanism elucidation and novel drug design. With the explosive growth of proteins in sequence databases, how to accurately and efficiently identify these binding sites from sequences becomes essential. However, current methods mostly rely on expensive multiple sequence alignments or experimental protein structures, limiting their genome-scale applications. Besides, these methods haven't fully explored the geometry of the protein structures. Here, we propose GPSite, a multi-task network for simultaneously predicting binding residues of DNA, RNA, peptide, protein, ATP, HEM, and metal ions on proteins. GPSite was trained on informative sequence embeddings and predicted structures from protein language models, while comprehensively extracting residual and relational geometric contexts in an end-to-end manner. Experiments demonstrate that GPSite substantially surpasses state-of-the-art sequence-based and structure-based approaches on various benchmark datasets, even when the structures are not well-predicted. The low computational cost of GPSite enables rapid genome-scale binding residue annotations for over 568,000 sequences, providing opportunities to unveil unexplored associations of binding sites with molecular functions, biological processes, and genetic variants. The GPSite webserver and annotation database can be freely accessed at https://bio-web1.nscc-gz.cn/app/GPSite.
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Affiliation(s)
- Qianmu Yuan
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen UniversityGuangzhouChina
| | - Chong Tian
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen UniversityGuangzhouChina
| | - Yuedong Yang
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen UniversityGuangzhouChina
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9
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Song FV, Su J, Huang S, Zhang N, Li K, Ni M, Liao M. DeepSS2GO: protein function prediction from secondary structure. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae196. [PMID: 38701416 PMCID: PMC11066904 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae196] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/24/2024] [Revised: 03/31/2024] [Accepted: 04/10/2024] [Indexed: 05/05/2024] Open
Abstract
Predicting protein function is crucial for understanding biological life processes, preventing diseases and developing new drug targets. In recent years, methods based on sequence, structure and biological networks for protein function annotation have been extensively researched. Although obtaining a protein in three-dimensional structure through experimental or computational methods enhances the accuracy of function prediction, the sheer volume of proteins sequenced by high-throughput technologies presents a significant challenge. To address this issue, we introduce a deep neural network model DeepSS2GO (Secondary Structure to Gene Ontology). It is a predictor incorporating secondary structure features along with primary sequence and homology information. The algorithm expertly combines the speed of sequence-based information with the accuracy of structure-based features while streamlining the redundant data in primary sequences and bypassing the time-consuming challenges of tertiary structure analysis. The results show that the prediction performance surpasses state-of-the-art algorithms. It has the ability to predict key functions by effectively utilizing secondary structure information, rather than broadly predicting general Gene Ontology terms. Additionally, DeepSS2GO predicts five times faster than advanced algorithms, making it highly applicable to massive sequencing data. The source code and trained models are available at https://github.com/orca233/DeepSS2GO.
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Affiliation(s)
- Fu V Song
- Department of Chemical Biology, School of Life Sciences, Southern University of Science and Technology, Xueyuan Avenue, 518055, Shenzhen, China
| | - Jiaqi Su
- Department of Chemical Biology, School of Life Sciences, Southern University of Science and Technology, Xueyuan Avenue, 518055, Shenzhen, China
| | - Sixing Huang
- Gemini Data Japan, Kitaku Oujikamiya 1-11-11, 115-0043, Tokyo, Japan
| | - Neng Zhang
- Electronic Engineering and Computer Science, Queen Mary University of London, Mile End Road, E1 4NS, London, UK
| | - Kaiyue Li
- Department of Chemical Biology, School of Life Sciences, Southern University of Science and Technology, Xueyuan Avenue, 518055, Shenzhen, China
| | - Ming Ni
- MGI Tech, Beishan Industrial Zone, 518083, Shenzhen, China
| | - Maofu Liao
- Department of Chemical Biology, School of Life Sciences, Southern University of Science and Technology, Xueyuan Avenue, 518055, Shenzhen, China
- Institute for Biological Electron Microscopy, Southern University of Science and Technology, Xueyuan Avenue, 518055, Shenzhen, China
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10
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Zheng L, Shi S, Lu M, Fang P, Pan Z, Zhang H, Zhou Z, Zhang H, Mou M, Huang S, Tao L, Xia W, Li H, Zeng Z, Zhang S, Chen Y, Li Z, Zhu F. AnnoPRO: a strategy for protein function annotation based on multi-scale protein representation and a hybrid deep learning of dual-path encoding. Genome Biol 2024; 25:41. [PMID: 38303023 PMCID: PMC10832132 DOI: 10.1186/s13059-024-03166-1] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/06/2023] [Accepted: 01/05/2024] [Indexed: 02/03/2024] Open
Abstract
Protein function annotation has been one of the longstanding issues in biological sciences, and various computational methods have been developed. However, the existing methods suffer from a serious long-tail problem, with a large number of GO families containing few annotated proteins. Herein, an innovative strategy named AnnoPRO was therefore constructed by enabling sequence-based multi-scale protein representation, dual-path protein encoding using pre-training, and function annotation by long short-term memory-based decoding. A variety of case studies based on different benchmarks were conducted, which confirmed the superior performance of AnnoPRO among available methods. Source code and models have been made freely available at: https://github.com/idrblab/AnnoPRO and https://zenodo.org/records/10012272.
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Affiliation(s)
- Lingyan Zheng
- College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China
- Industry Solutions Research and Development, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Hangzhou, 330110, China
| | - Shuiyang Shi
- College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China
| | - Mingkun Lu
- College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China
| | - Pan Fang
- Industry Solutions Research and Development, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Hangzhou, 330110, China
- Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Center of Future Digital Healthcare, Hangzhou, 330110, China
| | - Ziqi Pan
- College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China
| | - Hongning Zhang
- College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China
| | - Zhimeng Zhou
- College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China
| | - Hanyu Zhang
- College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China
| | - Minjie Mou
- College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China
| | - Shijie Huang
- College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China
| | - Lin Tao
- Key Laboratory of Elemene Class Anti-Cancer Chinese Medicines, Engineering Laboratory of Development and Application of Traditional Chinese Medicines, Collaborative Innovation Center of Traditional Chinese Medicines of Zhejiang Province, School of Pharmacy, Hangzhou Normal University, Hangzhou, 311121, China
| | - Weiqi Xia
- Pharmaceutical Department, Zhejiang Provincial People's Hospital, Hangzhou, 310014, China
| | - Honglin Li
- School of Pharmacy, East China University of Science and Technology, Shanghai, 200237, China
| | - Zhenyu Zeng
- Industry Solutions Research and Development, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Hangzhou, 330110, China
- Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Center of Future Digital Healthcare, Hangzhou, 330110, China
| | - Shun Zhang
- Industry Solutions Research and Development, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Hangzhou, 330110, China
- Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Center of Future Digital Healthcare, Hangzhou, 330110, China
| | - Yuzong Chen
- State Key Laboratory of Chemical Oncogenomics, Key Laboratory of Chemical Biology, The Graduate School at Shenzhen, Tsinghua University, Shenzhen, 518055, China
| | - Zhaorong Li
- Industry Solutions Research and Development, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Hangzhou, 330110, China.
- Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Center of Future Digital Healthcare, Hangzhou, 330110, China.
| | - Feng Zhu
- College of Pharmaceutical Sciences, The Second Affiliated Hospital, Zhejiang University School of Medicine, Zhejiang University, Hangzhou, 310058, China.
- Industry Solutions Research and Development, Alibaba Cloud Computing, Hangzhou, 330110, China.
- Innovation Institute for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine of Zhejiang University, Alibaba-Zhejiang University Joint Research Center of Future Digital Healthcare, Hangzhou, 330110, China.
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11
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Song Y, Zhang C, Omenn GS, O’Meara MJ, Welch JD. Predicting the Structural Impact of Human Alternative Splicing. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2023:2023.12.21.572928. [PMID: 38187531 PMCID: PMC10769328 DOI: 10.1101/2023.12.21.572928] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/09/2024]
Abstract
Protein structure prediction with neural networks is a powerful new method for linking protein sequence, structure, and function, but structures have generally been predicted for only a single isoform of each gene, neglecting splice variants. To investigate the structural implications of alternative splicing, we used AlphaFold2 to predict the structures of more than 11,000 human isoforms. We employed multiple metrics to identify splicing-induced structural alterations, including template matching score, secondary structure composition, surface charge distribution, radius of gyration, accessibility of post-translational modification sites, and structure-based function prediction. We identified examples of how alternative splicing induced clear changes in each of these properties. Structural similarity between isoforms largely correlated with degree of sequence identity, but we identified a subset of isoforms with low structural similarity despite high sequence similarity. Exon skipping and alternative last exons tended to increase the surface charge and radius of gyration. Splicing also buried or exposed numerous post-translational modification sites, most notably among the isoforms of BAX. Functional prediction nominated numerous functional differences among isoforms of the same gene, with loss of function compared to the reference predominating. Finally, we used single-cell RNA-seq data from the Tabula Sapiens to determine the cell types in which each structure is expressed. Our work represents an important resource for studying the structure and function of splice isoforms across the cell types of the human body.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yuxuan Song
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
| | - Chengxin Zhang
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
| | - Gilbert S. Omenn
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
| | - Matthew J. O’Meara
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
- Department of Medicinal Chemistry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
| | - Joshua D. Welch
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI, USA
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12
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Chen J, Gu Z, Lai L, Pei J. In silico protein function prediction: the rise of machine learning-based approaches. MEDICAL REVIEW (2021) 2023; 3:487-510. [PMID: 38282798 PMCID: PMC10808870 DOI: 10.1515/mr-2023-0038] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/14/2023] [Accepted: 10/11/2023] [Indexed: 01/30/2024]
Abstract
Proteins function as integral actors in essential life processes, rendering the realm of protein research a fundamental domain that possesses the potential to propel advancements in pharmaceuticals and disease investigation. Within the context of protein research, an imperious demand arises to uncover protein functionalities and untangle intricate mechanistic underpinnings. Due to the exorbitant costs and limited throughput inherent in experimental investigations, computational models offer a promising alternative to accelerate protein function annotation. In recent years, protein pre-training models have exhibited noteworthy advancement across multiple prediction tasks. This advancement highlights a notable prospect for effectively tackling the intricate downstream task associated with protein function prediction. In this review, we elucidate the historical evolution and research paradigms of computational methods for predicting protein function. Subsequently, we summarize the progress in protein and molecule representation as well as feature extraction techniques. Furthermore, we assess the performance of machine learning-based algorithms across various objectives in protein function prediction, thereby offering a comprehensive perspective on the progress within this field.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jiaxiao Chen
- Center for Quantitative Biology, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China
| | - Zhonghui Gu
- Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China
| | - Luhua Lai
- Center for Quantitative Biology, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China
- Peking-Tsinghua Center for Life Sciences, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China
- BNLMS, College of Chemistry and Molecular Engineering, Peking University, Beijing, China
- Research Unit of Drug Design Method, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (2021RU014), Beijing, China
| | - Jianfeng Pei
- Center for Quantitative Biology, Academy for Advanced Interdisciplinary Studies, Peking University, Beijing, China
- Research Unit of Drug Design Method, Chinese Academy of Medical Sciences (2021RU014), Beijing, China
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13
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Zhang C, Lydia Freddolino P. A large-scale assessment of sequence database search tools for homology-based protein function prediction. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2023:2023.11.14.567021. [PMID: 38013998 PMCID: PMC10680702 DOI: 10.1101/2023.11.14.567021] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/29/2023]
Abstract
Sequence database searches followed by homology-based function transfer form one of the oldest and most popular approaches for predicting protein functions, such as Gene Ontology (GO) terms. Although sequence search tools are the basis of homology-based protein function prediction, previous studies have scarcely explored how to select the optimal sequence search tools and configure their parameters to achieve the best function prediction. In this paper, we evaluate the effect of using different options from among popular search tools, as well as the impacts of search parameters, on protein function prediction. When predicting GO terms on a large benchmark dataset, we found that BLASTp and MMseqs2 consistently exceed the performance of other tools, including DIAMOND - one of the most popular tools for function prediction - under default search parameters. However, with the correct parameter settings, DIAMOND can perform comparably to BLASTp and MMseqs2 in function prediction. This study emphasizes the critical role of search parameter settings in homology-based function transfer.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chengxin Zhang
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
- Department of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 48109, USA
| | - P. Lydia Freddolino
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, MI 48109, USA
- Department of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, 48109, USA
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14
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Ibtehaz N, Kagaya Y, Kihara D. Domain-PFP allows protein function prediction using function-aware domain embedding representations. Commun Biol 2023; 6:1103. [PMID: 37907681 PMCID: PMC10618451 DOI: 10.1038/s42003-023-05476-9] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 05/17/2023] [Accepted: 10/17/2023] [Indexed: 11/02/2023] Open
Abstract
Domains are functional and structural units of proteins that govern various biological functions performed by the proteins. Therefore, the characterization of domains in a protein can serve as a proper functional representation of proteins. Here, we employ a self-supervised protocol to derive functionally consistent representations for domains by learning domain-Gene Ontology (GO) co-occurrences and associations. The domain embeddings we constructed turned out to be effective in performing actual function prediction tasks. Extensive evaluations showed that protein representations using the domain embeddings are superior to those of large-scale protein language models in GO prediction tasks. Moreover, the new function prediction method built on the domain embeddings, named Domain-PFP, substantially outperformed the state-of-the-art function predictors. Additionally, Domain-PFP demonstrated competitive performance in the CAFA3 evaluation, achieving overall the best performance among the top teams that participated in the assessment.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nabil Ibtehaz
- Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
| | - Yuki Kagaya
- Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA
| | - Daisuke Kihara
- Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
- Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, USA.
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15
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Song Y, Yuan Q, Zhao H, Yang Y. Accurately identifying nucleic-acid-binding sites through geometric graph learning on language model predicted structures. Brief Bioinform 2023; 24:bbad360. [PMID: 37824738 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad360] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/09/2023] [Revised: 09/18/2023] [Accepted: 09/18/2023] [Indexed: 10/14/2023] Open
Abstract
The interactions between nucleic acids and proteins are important in diverse biological processes. The high-quality prediction of nucleic-acid-binding sites continues to pose a significant challenge. Presently, the predictive efficacy of sequence-based methods is constrained by their exclusive consideration of sequence context information, whereas structure-based methods are unsuitable for proteins lacking known tertiary structures. Though protein structures predicted by AlphaFold2 could be used, the extensive computing requirement of AlphaFold2 hinders its use for genome-wide applications. Based on the recent breakthrough of ESMFold for fast prediction of protein structures, we have developed GLMSite, which accurately identifies DNA- and RNA-binding sites using geometric graph learning on ESMFold predicted structures. Here, the predicted protein structures are employed to construct protein structural graph with residues as nodes and spatially neighboring residue pairs for edges. The node representations are further enhanced through the pre-trained language model ProtTrans. The network was trained using a geometric vector perceptron, and the geometric embeddings were subsequently fed into a common network to acquire common binding characteristics. Finally, these characteristics were input into two fully connected layers to predict binding sites with DNA and RNA, respectively. Through comprehensive tests on DNA/RNA benchmark datasets, GLMSite was shown to surpass the latest sequence-based methods and be comparable with structure-based methods. Moreover, the prediction was shown useful for inferring nucleic-acid-binding proteins, demonstrating its potential for protein function discovery. The datasets, codes, and trained models are available at https://github.com/biomed-AI/nucleic-acid-binding.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yidong Song
- Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing of MOE, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510000, China
| | - Qianmu Yuan
- Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing of MOE, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510000, China
| | - Huiying Zhao
- Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing of MOE, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510000, China
| | - Yuedong Yang
- Key Laboratory of Machine Intelligence and Advanced Computing of MOE, School of Computer Science and Engineering, Sun Yat-sen University, Guangzhou 510000, China
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16
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Ibtehaz N, Kagaya Y, Kihara D. Domain-PFP: Protein Function Prediction Using Function-Aware Domain Embedding Representations. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2023:2023.08.23.554486. [PMID: 37662252 PMCID: PMC10473699 DOI: 10.1101/2023.08.23.554486] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 09/05/2023]
Abstract
Domains are functional and structural units of proteins that govern various biological functions performed by the proteins. Therefore, the characterization of domains in a protein can serve as a proper functional representation of proteins. Here, we employ a self-supervised protocol to derive functionally consistent representations for domains by learning domain-Gene Ontology (GO) co-occurrences and associations. The domain embeddings we constructed turned out to be effective in performing actual function prediction tasks. Extensive evaluations showed that protein representations using the domain embeddings are superior to those of large-scale protein language models in GO prediction tasks. Moreover, the new function prediction method built on the domain embeddings, named Domain-PFP, significantly outperformed the state-of-the-art function predictors. Additionally, Domain-PFP demonstrated competitive performance in the CAFA3 evaluation, achieving overall the best performance among the top teams that participated in the assessment.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nabil Ibtehaz
- Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States
| | - Yuki Kagaya
- Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States
| | - Daisuke Kihara
- Department of Computer Science, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States
- Department of Biological Sciences, Purdue University, West Lafayette, IN, United States
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