1
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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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2
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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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3
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Gong X, Zhang J, Gan Q, Teng Y, Hou J, Lyu Y, Liu Z, Wu Z, Dai R, Zou Y, Wang X, Zhu D, Zhu H, Liu T, Yan Y. Advancing microbial production through artificial intelligence-aided biology. Biotechnol Adv 2024; 74:108399. [PMID: 38925317 DOI: 10.1016/j.biotechadv.2024.108399] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 01/03/2024] [Revised: 05/20/2024] [Accepted: 06/23/2024] [Indexed: 06/28/2024]
Abstract
Microbial cell factories (MCFs) have been leveraged to construct sustainable platforms for value-added compound production. To optimize metabolism and reach optimal productivity, synthetic biology has developed various genetic devices to engineer microbial systems by gene editing, high-throughput protein engineering, and dynamic regulation. However, current synthetic biology methodologies still rely heavily on manual design, laborious testing, and exhaustive analysis. The emerging interdisciplinary field of artificial intelligence (AI) and biology has become pivotal in addressing the remaining challenges. AI-aided microbial production harnesses the power of processing, learning, and predicting vast amounts of biological data within seconds, providing outputs with high probability. With well-trained AI models, the conventional Design-Build-Test (DBT) cycle has been transformed into a multidimensional Design-Build-Test-Learn-Predict (DBTLP) workflow, leading to significantly improved operational efficiency and reduced labor consumption. Here, we comprehensively review the main components and recent advances in AI-aided microbial production, focusing on genome annotation, AI-aided protein engineering, artificial functional protein design, and AI-enabled pathway prediction. Finally, we discuss the challenges of integrating novel AI techniques into biology and propose the potential of large language models (LLMs) in advancing microbial production.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xinyu Gong
- School of Chemical, Materials, and Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
| | - Jianli Zhang
- School of Chemical, Materials, and Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
| | - Qi Gan
- School of Chemical, Materials, and Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
| | - Yuxi Teng
- School of Chemical, Materials, and Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
| | - Jixin Hou
- School of ECAM, College of Engineering, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
| | - Yanjun Lyu
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington 76019, USA
| | - Zhengliang Liu
- School of Computing, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
| | - Zihao Wu
- School of Computing, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
| | - Runpeng Dai
- Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA
| | - Yusong Zou
- School of Chemical, Materials, and Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
| | - Xianqiao Wang
- School of ECAM, College of Engineering, University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
| | - Dajiang Zhu
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering, The University of Texas at Arlington, Arlington 76019, USA
| | - Hongtu Zhu
- Department of Biostatistics, University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Chapel Hill, NC 27599, USA
| | - Tianming Liu
- School of Computing, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA
| | - Yajun Yan
- School of Chemical, Materials, and Biomedical Engineering, College of Engineering, The University of Georgia, Athens, GA 30602, USA.
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4
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Liu Y, Zhang Y, Chen Z, Peng J. POLAT: Protein function prediction based on soft mask graph network and residue-Label ATtention. Comput Biol Chem 2024; 110:108064. [PMID: 38677014 DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiolchem.2024.108064] [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: 08/12/2023] [Revised: 01/19/2024] [Accepted: 03/26/2024] [Indexed: 04/29/2024]
Abstract
MOTIVATION Elucidating protein function is a central problem in biochemistry, genetics, and molecular biology. Developing computational methods for protein function prediction is critical due to the significant gap between sequence and functional data. Recent advances in protein structure prediction, which strongly correlates with function, make it feasible to use structure to predict function. However, current structure-based methods overlook the fact that individual residues may contribute differently to the protein's function and do not take into account the correlation between protein residues and their functions. The challenge of effectively utilizing the relationship between protein residues and function-level information to predict protein function remains unsolved. RESULT We proposed a protein function prediction method based on Soft Mask Graph Networks and Residue-Label Attention (POLAT), which could combine sequence features, predicted structure features, and function-level information to get an accurate prediction. We use soft mask graph networks to adaptively extract the residues relevant to functions. A residue-label attention mechanism is adopted to obtain the protein-level encoded features of a protein, which are then concatenated with a protein-level embedding and fed into a dense classifier to determine the probabilities of each function. POLAT achieves 0.670, 0.515, 0.578 Fmax and 0.677, 0.409, 0.507 AUPR on the PDB cdhit test set for the MFO, BPO, and CCO domains, respectively, outperforming the existing structure-based SOTA method GAT-GO (Fmax 0.633, 0.492, 0.547; AUPR 0.660, 0.381, 0.479). POLAT is also competitive in extensive experiments among sequence-based and multimodal methods and achieves the SOTA performance in three out of six metrics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yang Liu
- Intelligent Bioinformatics Laboratory, School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China.
| | - Yi Zhang
- Intelligent Bioinformatics Laboratory, School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China.
| | - ZiHao Chen
- Intelligent Bioinformatics Laboratory, School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China.
| | - Jing Peng
- Intelligent Bioinformatics Laboratory, School of Computer and Artificial Intelligence, Wuhan University of Technology, Wuhan, 430070, China.
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Armah-Sekum RE, Szedmak S, Rousu J. Protein function prediction through multi-view multi-label latent tensor reconstruction. BMC Bioinformatics 2024; 25:174. [PMID: 38698340 PMCID: PMC11067221 DOI: 10.1186/s12859-024-05789-4] [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: 02/23/2024] [Accepted: 04/17/2024] [Indexed: 05/05/2024] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND In last two decades, the use of high-throughput sequencing technologies has accelerated the pace of discovery of proteins. However, due to the time and resource limitations of rigorous experimental functional characterization, the functions of a vast majority of them remain unknown. As a result, computational methods offering accurate, fast and large-scale assignment of functions to new and previously unannotated proteins are sought after. Leveraging the underlying associations between the multiplicity of features that describe proteins could reveal functional insights into the diverse roles of proteins and improve performance on the automatic function prediction task. RESULTS We present GO-LTR, a multi-view multi-label prediction model that relies on a high-order tensor approximation of model weights combined with non-linear activation functions. The model is capable of learning high-order relationships between multiple input views representing the proteins and predicting high-dimensional multi-label output consisting of protein functional categories. We demonstrate the competitiveness of our method on various performance measures. Experiments show that GO-LTR learns polynomial combinations between different protein features, resulting in improved performance. Additional investigations establish GO-LTR's practical potential in assigning functions to proteins under diverse challenging scenarios: very low sequence similarity to previously observed sequences, rarely observed and highly specific terms in the gene ontology. IMPLEMENTATION The code and data used for training GO-LTR is available at https://github.com/aalto-ics-kepaco/GO-LTR-prediction .
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Affiliation(s)
- Robert Ebo Armah-Sekum
- Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Konemiehentie 2, 02150, Espoo, Finland.
| | - Sandor Szedmak
- Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Konemiehentie 2, 02150, Espoo, Finland
| | - Juho Rousu
- Department of Computer Science, Aalto University, Konemiehentie 2, 02150, Espoo, Finland.
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6
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Zhao Y, Yang Z, Wang L, Zhang Y, Lin H, Wang J. Predicting Protein Functions Based on Heterogeneous Graph Attention Technique. IEEE J Biomed Health Inform 2024; 28:2408-2415. [PMID: 38319781 DOI: 10.1109/jbhi.2024.3357834] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 02/08/2024]
Abstract
In bioinformatics, protein function prediction stands as a fundamental area of research and plays a crucial role in addressing various biological challenges, such as the identification of potential targets for drug discovery and the elucidation of disease mechanisms. However, known functional annotation databases usually provide positive experimental annotations that proteins carry out a given function, and rarely record negative experimental annotations that proteins do not carry out a given function. Therefore, existing computational methods based on deep learning models focus on these positive annotations for prediction and ignore these scarce but informative negative annotations, leading to an underestimation of precision. To address this issue, we introduce a deep learning method that utilizes a heterogeneous graph attention technique. The method first constructs a heterogeneous graph that covers the protein-protein interaction network, ontology structure, and positive and negative annotation information. Then, it learns embedding representations of proteins and ontology terms by using the heterogeneous graph attention technique. Finally, it leverages these learned representations to reconstruct the positive protein-term associations and score unobserved functional annotations. It can enhance the predictive performance by incorporating these known limited negative annotations into the constructed heterogeneous graph. Experimental results on three species (i.e., Human, Mouse, and Arabidopsis) demonstrate that our method can achieve better performance in predicting new protein annotations than state-of-the-art methods.
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7
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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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8
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Palacios A, Acharya P, Peidl A, Beck M, Blanco E, Mishra A, Bawa-Khalfe T, Pakhrin S. SumoPred-PLM: human SUMOylation and SUMO2/3 sites Prediction using Pre-trained Protein Language Model. NAR Genom Bioinform 2024; 6:lqae011. [PMID: 38327870 PMCID: PMC10849187 DOI: 10.1093/nargab/lqae011] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/21/2023] [Revised: 11/17/2023] [Accepted: 01/17/2024] [Indexed: 02/09/2024] Open
Abstract
SUMOylation is an essential post-translational modification system with the ability to regulate nearly all aspects of cellular physiology. Three major paralogues SUMO1, SUMO2 and SUMO3 form a covalent bond between the small ubiquitin-like modifier with lysine residues at consensus sites in protein substrates. Biochemical studies continue to identify unique biological functions for protein targets conjugated to SUMO1 versus the highly homologous SUMO2 and SUMO3 paralogues. Yet, the field has failed to harness contemporary AI approaches including pre-trained protein language models to fully expand and/or recognize the SUMOylated proteome. Herein, we present a novel, deep learning-based approach called SumoPred-PLM for human SUMOylation prediction with sensitivity, specificity, Matthew's correlation coefficient, and accuracy of 74.64%, 73.36%, 0.48% and 74.00%, respectively, on the CPLM 4.0 independent test dataset. In addition, this novel platform uses contextualized embeddings obtained from a pre-trained protein language model, ProtT5-XL-UniRef50 to identify SUMO2/3-specific conjugation sites. The results demonstrate that SumoPred-PLM is a powerful and unique computational tool to predict SUMOylation sites in proteins and accelerate discovery.
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Affiliation(s)
- Andrew Vargas Palacios
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering Technology, University of Houston-Downtown, 1 Main St., Houston, TX 77002, USA
| | - Pujan Acharya
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering Technology, University of Houston-Downtown, 1 Main St., Houston, TX 77002, USA
| | - Anthony Stephen Peidl
- Department of Biology and Biochemistry, Center for Nuclear Receptors & Cell Signaling, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA
| | - Moriah Rene Beck
- Department of Chemistry and Biochemistry, Wichita State University, 1845 Fairmount St., Wichita, KS 67260, USA
| | - Eduardo Blanco
- Department of Computer Science, University of Arizona, 1040 4th St., Tucson, AZ 85721, USA
| | - Avdesh Mishra
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, Texas A&M University-Kingsville, Kingsville, TX 78363, USA
| | - Tasneem Bawa-Khalfe
- Department of Biology and Biochemistry, Center for Nuclear Receptors & Cell Signaling, University of Houston, Houston, TX 77204, USA
| | - Subash Chandra Pakhrin
- Department of Computer Science and Engineering Technology, University of Houston-Downtown, 1 Main St., Houston, TX 77002, USA
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9
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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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10
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Wang W, Shuai Y, Yang Q, Zhang F, Zeng M, Li M. A comprehensive computational benchmark for evaluating deep learning-based protein function prediction approaches. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae050. [PMID: 38388682 PMCID: PMC10883809 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae050] [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: 12/13/2023] [Revised: 01/17/2024] [Accepted: 01/26/2024] [Indexed: 02/24/2024] Open
Abstract
Proteins play an important role in life activities and are the basic units for performing functions. Accurately annotating functions to proteins is crucial for understanding the intricate mechanisms of life and developing effective treatments for complex diseases. Traditional biological experiments struggle to keep pace with the growing number of known proteins. With the development of high-throughput sequencing technology, a wide variety of biological data provides the possibility to accurately predict protein functions by computational methods. Consequently, many computational methods have been proposed. Due to the diversity of application scenarios, it is necessary to conduct a comprehensive evaluation of these computational methods to determine the suitability of each algorithm for specific cases. In this study, we present a comprehensive benchmark, BeProf, to process data and evaluate representative computational methods. We first collect the latest datasets and analyze the data characteristics. Then, we investigate and summarize 17 state-of-the-art computational methods. Finally, we propose a novel comprehensive evaluation metric, design eight application scenarios and evaluate the performance of existing methods on these scenarios. Based on the evaluation, we provide practical recommendations for different scenarios, enabling users to select the most suitable method for their specific needs. All of these servers can be obtained from https://csuligroup.com/BEPROF and https://github.com/CSUBioGroup/BEPROF.
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Affiliation(s)
- Wenkang Wang
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, 932 South Lushan Road, Yuelu District, Changsha 410083, China
| | - Yunyan Shuai
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, 932 South Lushan Road, Yuelu District, Changsha 410083, China
| | - Qiurong Yang
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, 932 South Lushan Road, Yuelu District, Changsha 410083, China
| | - Fuhao Zhang
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, 932 South Lushan Road, Yuelu District, Changsha 410083, China
| | - Min Zeng
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, 932 South Lushan Road, Yuelu District, Changsha 410083, China
| | - Min Li
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, 932 South Lushan Road, Yuelu District, Changsha 410083, China
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11
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Li W, Wang B, Dai J, Kou Y, Chen X, Pan Y, Hu S, Xu ZZ. Partial order relation-based gene ontology embedding improves protein function prediction. Brief Bioinform 2024; 25:bbae077. [PMID: 38446740 PMCID: PMC10917077 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbae077] [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: 10/20/2023] [Revised: 01/22/2024] [Indexed: 03/08/2024] Open
Abstract
Protein annotation has long been a challenging task in computational biology. Gene Ontology (GO) has become one of the most popular frameworks to describe protein functions and their relationships. Prediction of a protein annotation with proper GO terms demands high-quality GO term representation learning, which aims to learn a low-dimensional dense vector representation with accompanying semantic meaning for each functional label, also known as embedding. However, existing GO term embedding methods, which mainly take into account ancestral co-occurrence information, have yet to capture the full topological information in the GO-directed acyclic graph (DAG). In this study, we propose a novel GO term representation learning method, PO2Vec, to utilize the partial order relationships to improve the GO term representations. Extensive evaluations show that PO2Vec achieves better outcomes than existing embedding methods in a variety of downstream biological tasks. Based on PO2Vec, we further developed a new protein function prediction method PO2GO, which demonstrates superior performance measured in multiple metrics and annotation specificity as well as few-shot prediction capability in the benchmarks. These results suggest that the high-quality representation of GO structure is critical for diverse biological tasks including computational protein annotation.
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Affiliation(s)
- Wenjing Li
- College of Computer Science and Software, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
| | - Bin Wang
- School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Nanchang University, Nanchang, China
| | - Jin Dai
- Center for Quantum Technology Research and School of Physics, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
| | - Yan Kou
- Xbiome, Scientific Research Building, Tsinghua High-Tech Park, Shenzhen, China
| | - Xiaojun Chen
- College of Computer Science and Software, Shenzhen University, Shenzhen, China
| | - Yi Pan
- Faculty of Computer Science and Control Engineering Shenzhen Institute of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences 1068 Xueyuan Avenue, Shenzhen University Town, Shenzhen, China
| | - Shuangwei Hu
- Xbiome, Scientific Research Building, Tsinghua High-Tech Park, Shenzhen, China
| | - Zhenjiang Zech Xu
- School of Mathematics and Computer Sciences, Nanchang University, Nanchang, China
- State Key Laboratory of Food Science and Technology, Nanchang University, Nanchang, China
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12
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Le NQK. Leveraging transformers-based language models in proteome bioinformatics. Proteomics 2023; 23:e2300011. [PMID: 37381841 DOI: 10.1002/pmic.202300011] [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: 05/14/2023] [Revised: 06/13/2023] [Accepted: 06/13/2023] [Indexed: 06/30/2023]
Abstract
In recent years, the rapid growth of biological data has increased interest in using bioinformatics to analyze and interpret this data. Proteomics, which studies the structure, function, and interactions of proteins, is a crucial area of bioinformatics. Using natural language processing (NLP) techniques in proteomics is an emerging field that combines machine learning and text mining to analyze biological data. Recently, transformer-based NLP models have gained significant attention for their ability to process variable-length input sequences in parallel, using self-attention mechanisms to capture long-range dependencies. In this review paper, we discuss the recent advancements in transformer-based NLP models in proteome bioinformatics and examine their advantages, limitations, and potential applications to improve the accuracy and efficiency of various tasks. Additionally, we highlight the challenges and future directions of using these models in proteome bioinformatics research. Overall, this review provides valuable insights into the potential of transformer-based NLP models to revolutionize proteome bioinformatics.
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Affiliation(s)
- Nguyen Quoc Khanh Le
- Professional Master Program in Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, College of Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan
- AIBioMed Research Group, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan
- Research Center for Artificial Intelligence in Medicine, Taipei Medical University, Taipei, Taiwan
- Translational Imaging Research Center, Taipei Medical University Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan
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13
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Zhang Y, Liu C, Liu M, Liu T, Lin H, Huang CB, Ning L. Attention is all you need: utilizing attention in AI-enabled drug discovery. Brief Bioinform 2023; 25:bbad467. [PMID: 38189543 PMCID: PMC10772984 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad467] [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: 09/30/2023] [Revised: 11/03/2023] [Accepted: 11/25/2023] [Indexed: 01/09/2024] Open
Abstract
Recently, attention mechanism and derived models have gained significant traction in drug development due to their outstanding performance and interpretability in handling complex data structures. This review offers an in-depth exploration of the principles underlying attention-based models and their advantages in drug discovery. We further elaborate on their applications in various aspects of drug development, from molecular screening and target binding to property prediction and molecule generation. Finally, we discuss the current challenges faced in the application of attention mechanisms and Artificial Intelligence technologies, including data quality, model interpretability and computational resource constraints, along with future directions for research. Given the accelerating pace of technological advancement, we believe that attention-based models will have an increasingly prominent role in future drug discovery. We anticipate that these models will usher in revolutionary breakthroughs in the pharmaceutical domain, significantly accelerating the pace of drug development.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yang Zhang
- Innovative Institute of Chinese Medicine and Pharmacy, Academy for Interdiscipline, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu, China
| | - Caiqi Liu
- Department of Gastrointestinal Medical Oncology, Harbin Medical University Cancer Hospital, No.150 Haping Road, Nangang District, Harbin, Heilongjiang 150081, China
- Key Laboratory of Molecular Oncology of Heilongjiang Province, No.150 Haping Road, Nangang District, Harbin, Heilongjiang 150081, China
| | - Mujiexin Liu
- Chongqing Key Laboratory of Sichuan-Chongqing Co-construction for Diagnosis and Treatment of Infectious Diseases Integrated Traditional Chinese and Western Medicine, College of Medical Technology, Chengdu University of Traditional Chinese Medicine, Chengdu, China
| | - Tianyuan Liu
- Graduate School of Science and Technology, University of Tsukuba, Tsukuba, Japan
| | - Hao Lin
- School of Life Science and Technology, University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Chengdu 610054, China
| | - Cheng-Bing Huang
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Aba Teachers University, Aba, China
| | - Lin Ning
- Yangtze Delta Region Institute (Quzhou), University of Electronic Science and Technology of China, Quzhou, Zhejiang, China
- School of Healthcare Technology, Chengdu Neusoft University, Chengdu 611844, China
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14
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Zhang C, Freddolino PL. 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] [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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15
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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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16
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Zhang X, Guo H, Zhang F, Wang X, Wu K, Qiu S, Liu B, Wang Y, Hu Y, Li J. HNetGO: protein function prediction via heterogeneous network transformer. Brief Bioinform 2023; 24:bbab556. [PMID: 37861172 PMCID: PMC10588005 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbab556] [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: 08/05/2021] [Revised: 11/18/2021] [Accepted: 12/04/2021] [Indexed: 10/21/2023] Open
Abstract
Protein function annotation is one of the most important research topics for revealing the essence of life at molecular level in the post-genome era. Current research shows that integrating multisource data can effectively improve the performance of protein function prediction models. However, the heavy reliance on complex feature engineering and model integration methods limits the development of existing methods. Besides, models based on deep learning only use labeled data in a certain dataset to extract sequence features, thus ignoring a large amount of existing unlabeled sequence data. Here, we propose an end-to-end protein function annotation model named HNetGO, which innovatively uses heterogeneous network to integrate protein sequence similarity and protein-protein interaction network information and combines the pretraining model to extract the semantic features of the protein sequence. In addition, we design an attention-based graph neural network model, which can effectively extract node-level features from heterogeneous networks and predict protein function by measuring the similarity between protein nodes and gene ontology term nodes. Comparative experiments on the human dataset show that HNetGO achieves state-of-the-art performance on cellular component and molecular function branches.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xiaoshuai Zhang
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China
| | - Huannan Guo
- General Hospital of Heilongjiang Province Land Reclamation Bureau, Harbin 150086, China
| | - Fan Zhang
- Center NHC Key Laboratory of Cell Transplantation, The First Affiliated Hospital of Harbin Medical University, Harbin 150086, China
| | - Xuan Wang
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China
| | - Kaitao Wu
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China
| | - Shizheng Qiu
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Bo Liu
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Yadong Wang
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Yang Hu
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology, Harbin 150001, China
| | - Junyi Li
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Harbin Institute of Technology (Shenzhen), Shenzhen, Guangdong 518055, China
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17
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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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18
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Zheng R, Huang Z, Deng L. Large-scale predicting protein functions through heterogeneous feature fusion. Brief Bioinform 2023:bbad243. [PMID: 37401369 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad243] [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: 03/12/2023] [Revised: 05/18/2023] [Accepted: 06/12/2023] [Indexed: 07/05/2023] Open
Abstract
As the volume of protein sequence and structure data grows rapidly, the functions of the overwhelming majority of proteins cannot be experimentally determined. Automated annotation of protein function at a large scale is becoming increasingly important. Existing computational prediction methods are typically based on expanding the relatively small number of experimentally determined functions to large collections of proteins with various clues, including sequence homology, protein-protein interaction, gene co-expression, etc. Although there has been some progress in protein function prediction in recent years, the development of accurate and reliable solutions still has a long way to go. Here we exploit AlphaFold predicted three-dimensional structural information, together with other non-structural clues, to develop a large-scale approach termed PredGO to annotate Gene Ontology (GO) functions for proteins. We use a pre-trained language model, geometric vector perceptrons and attention mechanisms to extract heterogeneous features of proteins and fuse these features for function prediction. The computational results demonstrate that the proposed method outperforms other state-of-the-art approaches for predicting GO functions of proteins in terms of both coverage and accuracy. The improvement of coverage is because the number of structures predicted by AlphaFold is greatly increased, and on the other hand, PredGO can extensively use non-structural information for functional prediction. Moreover, we show that over 205 000 ($\sim $100%) entries in UniProt for human are annotated by PredGO, over 186 000 ($\sim $90%) of which are based on predicted structure. The webserver and database are available at http://predgo.denglab.org/.
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Affiliation(s)
- Rongtao Zheng
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, 410000 Changsha, China
| | - Zhijian Huang
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, 410000 Changsha, China
| | - Lei Deng
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Central South University, 410000 Changsha, China
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19
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Boadu F, Cao H, Cheng J. Combining protein sequences and structures with transformers and equivariant graph neural networks to predict protein function. Bioinformatics 2023; 39:i318-i325. [PMID: 37387145 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btad208] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 07/01/2023] Open
Abstract
MOTIVATION Millions of protein sequences have been generated by numerous genome and transcriptome sequencing projects. However, experimentally determining the function of the proteins is still a time consuming, low-throughput, and expensive process, leading to a large protein sequence-function gap. Therefore, it is important to develop computational methods to accurately predict protein function to fill the gap. Even though many methods have been developed to use protein sequences as input to predict function, much fewer methods leverage protein structures in protein function prediction because there was lack of accurate protein structures for most proteins until recently. RESULTS We developed TransFun-a method using a transformer-based protein language model and 3D-equivariant graph neural networks to distill information from both protein sequences and structures to predict protein function. It extracts feature embeddings from protein sequences using a pre-trained protein language model (ESM) via transfer learning and combines them with 3D structures of proteins predicted by AlphaFold2 through equivariant graph neural networks. Benchmarked on the CAFA3 test dataset and a new test dataset, TransFun outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, indicating that the language model and 3D-equivariant graph neural networks are effective methods to leverage protein sequences and structures to improve protein function prediction. Combining TransFun predictions and sequence similarity-based predictions can further increase prediction accuracy. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION The source code of TransFun is available at https://github.com/jianlin-cheng/TransFun.
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Affiliation(s)
- Frimpong Boadu
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, United States
| | - Hongyuan Cao
- Department of Statistics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, Unites States
| | - Jianlin Cheng
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, United States
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20
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Li H, Liu B. BioSeq-Diabolo: Biological sequence similarity analysis using Diabolo. PLoS Comput Biol 2023; 19:e1011214. [PMID: 37339155 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011214] [Citation(s) in RCA: 18] [Impact Index Per Article: 18.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/03/2022] [Accepted: 05/24/2023] [Indexed: 06/22/2023] Open
Abstract
As the key for biological sequence structure and function prediction, disease diagnosis and treatment, biological sequence similarity analysis has attracted more and more attentions. However, the exiting computational methods failed to accurately analyse the biological sequence similarities because of the various data types (DNA, RNA, protein, disease, etc) and their low sequence similarities (remote homology). Therefore, new concepts and techniques are desired to solve this challenging problem. Biological sequences (DNA, RNA and protein sequences) can be considered as the sentences of "the book of life", and their similarities can be considered as the biological language semantics (BLS). In this study, we are seeking the semantics analysis techniques derived from the natural language processing (NLP) to comprehensively and accurately analyse the biological sequence similarities. 27 semantics analysis methods derived from NLP were introduced to analyse biological sequence similarities, bringing new concepts and techniques to biological sequence similarity analysis. Experimental results show that these semantics analysis methods are able to facilitate the development of protein remote homology detection, circRNA-disease associations identification and protein function annotation, achieving better performance than the other state-of-the-art predictors in the related fields. Based on these semantics analysis methods, a platform called BioSeq-Diabolo has been constructed, which is named after a popular traditional sport in China. The users only need to input the embeddings of the biological sequence data. BioSeq-Diabolo will intelligently identify the task, and then accurately analyse the biological sequence similarities based on biological language semantics. BioSeq-Diabolo will integrate different biological sequence similarities in a supervised manner by using Learning to Rank (LTR), and the performance of the constructed methods will be evaluated and analysed so as to recommend the best methods for the users. The web server and stand-alone package of BioSeq-Diabolo can be accessed at http://bliulab.net/BioSeq-Diabolo/server/.
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Affiliation(s)
- Hongliang Li
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
| | - Bin Liu
- School of Computer Science and Technology, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
- Advanced Research Institute of Multidisciplinary Science, Beijing Institute of Technology, Beijing, China
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21
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Oliveira GB, Pedrini H, Dias Z. TEMPROT: protein function annotation using transformers embeddings and homology search. BMC Bioinformatics 2023; 24:242. [PMID: 37291492 DOI: 10.1186/s12859-023-05375-0] [Citation(s) in RCA: 1] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/20/2022] [Accepted: 06/02/2023] [Indexed: 06/10/2023] Open
Abstract
BACKGROUND Although the development of sequencing technologies has provided a large number of protein sequences, the analysis of functions that each one plays is still difficult due to the efforts of laboratorial methods, making necessary the usage of computational methods to decrease this gap. As the main source of information available about proteins is their sequences, approaches that can use this information, such as classification based on the patterns of the amino acids and the inference based on sequence similarity using alignment tools, are able to predict a large collection of proteins. The methods available in the literature that use this type of feature can achieve good results, however, they present restrictions of protein length as input to their models. In this work, we present a new method, called TEMPROT, based on the fine-tuning and extraction of embeddings from an available architecture pre-trained on protein sequences. We also describe TEMPROT+, an ensemble between TEMPROT and BLASTp, a local alignment tool that analyzes sequence similarity, which improves the results of our former approach. RESULTS The evaluation of our proposed classifiers with the literature approaches has been conducted on our dataset, which was derived from CAFA3 challenge database. Both TEMPROT and TEMPROT+ achieved competitive results on [Formula: see text], [Formula: see text], AuPRC and IAuPRC metrics on Biological Process (BP), Cellular Component (CC) and Molecular Function (MF) ontologies compared to state-of-the-art models, with the main results equal to 0.581, 0.692 and 0.662 of [Formula: see text] on BP, CC and MF, respectively. CONCLUSIONS The comparison with the literature showed that our model presented competitive results compared the state-of-the-art approaches considering the amino acid sequence pattern recognition and homology analysis. Our model also presented improvements related to the input size that the model can use to train compared to the literature methods.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Helio Pedrini
- Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil
| | - Zanoni Dias
- Institute of Computing, University of Campinas, Campinas, Brazil
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22
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Wang Z, Deng Z, Zhang W, Lou Q, Choi KS, Wei Z, Wang L, Wu J. MMSMAPlus: a multi-view multi-scale multi-attention embedding model for protein function prediction. Brief Bioinform 2023:7187109. [PMID: 37258453 DOI: 10.1093/bib/bbad201] [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: 12/29/2022] [Revised: 04/16/2023] [Accepted: 05/08/2023] [Indexed: 06/02/2023] Open
Abstract
Protein is the most important component in organisms and plays an indispensable role in life activities. In recent years, a large number of intelligent methods have been proposed to predict protein function. These methods obtain different types of protein information, including sequence, structure and interaction network. Among them, protein sequences have gained significant attention where methods are investigated to extract the information from different views of features. However, how to fully exploit the views for effective protein sequence analysis remains a challenge. In this regard, we propose a multi-view, multi-scale and multi-attention deep neural model (MMSMA) for protein function prediction. First, MMSMA extracts multi-view features from protein sequences, including one-hot encoding features, evolutionary information features, deep semantic features and overlapping property features based on physiochemistry. Second, a specific multi-scale multi-attention deep network model (MSMA) is built for each view to realize the deep feature learning and preliminary classification. In MSMA, both multi-scale local patterns and long-range dependence from protein sequences can be captured. Third, a multi-view adaptive decision mechanism is developed to make a comprehensive decision based on the classification results of all the views. To further improve the prediction performance, an extended version of MMSMA, MMSMAPlus, is proposed to integrate homology-based protein prediction under the framework of multi-view deep neural model. Experimental results show that the MMSMAPlus has promising performance and is significantly superior to the state-of-the-art methods. The source code can be found at https://github.com/wzy-2020/MMSMAPlus.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zhongyu Wang
- School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China
| | - Zhaohong Deng
- School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China
| | - Wei Zhang
- School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China
| | - Qiongdan Lou
- School of Artificial Intelligence and Computer Science, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China
| | | | - Zhisheng Wei
- National Key Laboratory of Food Science and Resource Mining, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China
| | - Lei Wang
- National Key Laboratory of Food Science and Resource Mining, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China
| | - Jing Wu
- National Key Laboratory of Food Science and Resource Mining, Jiangnan University, Wuxi, China
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23
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Pan T, Li C, Bi Y, Wang Z, Gasser RB, Purcell AW, Akutsu T, Webb GI, Imoto S, Song J. PFresGO: an attention mechanism-based deep-learning approach for protein annotation by integrating gene ontology inter-relationships. Bioinformatics 2023; 39:7043095. [PMID: 36794913 PMCID: PMC9978587 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btad094] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 10/21/2022] [Revised: 02/10/2023] [Accepted: 02/15/2023] [Indexed: 02/17/2023] Open
Abstract
MOTIVATION The rapid accumulation of high-throughput sequence data demands the development of effective and efficient data-driven computational methods to functionally annotate proteins. However, most current approaches used for functional annotation simply focus on the use of protein-level information but ignore inter-relationships among annotations. RESULTS Here, we established PFresGO, an attention-based deep-learning approach that incorporates hierarchical structures in Gene Ontology (GO) graphs and advances in natural language processing algorithms for the functional annotation of proteins. PFresGO employs a self-attention operation to capture the inter-relationships of GO terms, updates its embedding accordingly and uses a cross-attention operation to project protein representations and GO embedding into a common latent space to identify global protein sequence patterns and local functional residues. We demonstrate that PFresGO consistently achieves superior performance across GO categories when compared with 'state-of-the-art' methods. Importantly, we show that PFresGO can identify functionally important residues in protein sequences by assessing the distribution of attention weightings. PFresGO should serve as an effective tool for the accurate functional annotation of proteins and functional domains within proteins. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION PFresGO is available for academic purposes at https://github.com/BioColLab/PFresGO. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Affiliation(s)
- Tong Pan
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia
| | - Chen Li
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia
| | - Yue Bi
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia
| | - Zhikang Wang
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia
| | - Robin B Gasser
- Department of Veterinary Biosciences, Melbourne Veterinary School, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC 3010, Australia
| | - Anthony W Purcell
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia
| | - Tatsuya Akutsu
- Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan
| | - Geoffrey I Webb
- Monash Data Futures Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia
| | - Seiya Imoto
- Division of Health Medical Intelligence, Human Genome Center, Institute of Medical Science, The University of Tokyo, Minato-ku, Tokyo 108-8639, Japan.,Collaborative Research Institute for Innovative Microbiology, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Tokyo 113-8657, Japan
| | - Jiangning Song
- Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Biomedicine Discovery Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia.,Bioinformatics Center, Institute for Chemical Research, Kyoto University, Uji 611-0011, Japan.,Monash Data Futures Institute, Monash University, Melbourne, VIC 3800, Australia
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24
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Boadu F, Cao H, Cheng J. Combining protein sequences and structures with transformers and equivariant graph neural networks to predict protein function. BIORXIV : THE PREPRINT SERVER FOR BIOLOGY 2023:2023.01.17.524477. [PMID: 36711471 PMCID: PMC9882282 DOI: 10.1101/2023.01.17.524477] [Citation(s) in RCA: 3] [Impact Index Per Article: 3.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 01/21/2023]
Abstract
Motivation Millions of protein sequences have been generated by numerous genome and transcriptome sequencing projects. However, experimentally determining the function of the proteins is still a time consuming, low-throughput, and expensive process, leading to a large protein sequence-function gap. Therefore, it is important to develop computational methods to accurately predict protein function to fill the gap. Even though many methods have been developed to use protein sequences as input to predict function, much fewer methods leverage protein structures in protein function prediction because there was lack of accurate protein structures for most proteins until recently. Results We developed TransFun - a method using a transformer-based protein language model and 3D-equivariant graph neural networks to distill information from both protein sequences and structures to predict protein function. It extracts feature embeddings from protein sequences using a pre-trained protein language model (ESM) via transfer learning and combines them with 3D structures of proteins predicted by AlphaFold2 through equivariant graph neural networks. Benchmarked on the CAFA3 test dataset and a new test dataset, TransFun outperforms several state-of-the-art methods, indicating the language model and 3D-equivariant graph neural networks are effective methods to leverage protein sequences and structures to improve protein function prediction. Combining TransFun predictions and sequence similarity-based predictions can further increase prediction accuracy. Availability The source code of TransFun is available at https://github.com/jianlin-cheng/TransFun. Contact chengji@missouri.edu.
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Affiliation(s)
- Frimpong Boadu
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA
| | - Hongyuan Cao
- Department of Statistics, Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA
| | - Jianlin Cheng
- Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri, Columbia, MO 65211, USA,Contact: To whom correspondence should be addressed.
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Ardern Z, Chakraborty S, Lenk F, Kaster AK. Elucidating the functional roles of prokaryotic proteins using big data and artificial intelligence. FEMS Microbiol Rev 2023; 47:fuad003. [PMID: 36725215 PMCID: PMC9960493 DOI: 10.1093/femsre/fuad003] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/12/2022] [Revised: 01/11/2023] [Accepted: 01/31/2023] [Indexed: 02/03/2023] Open
Abstract
Annotating protein sequences according to their biological functions is one of the key steps in understanding microbial diversity, metabolic potentials, and evolutionary histories. However, even in the best-studied prokaryotic genomes, not all proteins can be characterized by classical in vivo, in vitro, and/or in silico methods-a challenge rapidly growing alongside the advent of next-generation sequencing technologies and their enormous extension of 'omics' data in public databases. These so-called hypothetical proteins (HPs) represent a huge knowledge gap and hidden potential for biotechnological applications. Opportunities for leveraging the available 'Big Data' have recently proliferated with the use of artificial intelligence (AI). Here, we review the aims and methods of protein annotation and explain the different principles behind machine and deep learning algorithms including recent research examples, in order to assist both biologists wishing to apply AI tools in developing comprehensive genome annotations and computer scientists who want to contribute to this leading edge of biological research.
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Affiliation(s)
- Zachary Ardern
- Institute for Biological Interfaces 5 (Institut für Biologische Grenzflächen IBG 5), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
- Wellcome Trust Sanger Institute, Hinxton, Saffron Walden CB10 1RQ, United Kingdom
| | - Sagarika Chakraborty
- Institute for Biological Interfaces 5 (Institut für Biologische Grenzflächen IBG 5), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
| | - Florian Lenk
- Institute for Biological Interfaces 5 (Institut für Biologische Grenzflächen IBG 5), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
| | - Anne-Kristin Kaster
- Institute for Biological Interfaces 5 (Institut für Biologische Grenzflächen IBG 5), Karlsruhe Institute of Technology (KIT), 76344 Eggenstein-Leopoldshafen, Germany
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Zhu YH, Zhang C, Yu DJ, Zhang Y. Integrating unsupervised language model with triplet neural networks for protein gene ontology prediction. PLoS Comput Biol 2022; 18:e1010793. [PMID: 36548439 PMCID: PMC9822105 DOI: 10.1371/journal.pcbi.1010793] [Citation(s) in RCA: 8] [Impact Index Per Article: 4.0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/07/2022] [Revised: 01/06/2023] [Accepted: 12/05/2022] [Indexed: 12/24/2022] Open
Abstract
Accurate identification of protein function is critical to elucidate life mechanisms and design new drugs. We proposed a novel deep-learning method, ATGO, to predict Gene Ontology (GO) attributes of proteins through a triplet neural-network architecture embedded with pre-trained language models from protein sequences. The method was systematically tested on 1068 non-redundant benchmarking proteins and 3328 targets from the third Critical Assessment of Protein Function Annotation (CAFA) challenge. Experimental results showed that ATGO achieved a significant increase of the GO prediction accuracy compared to the state-of-the-art approaches in all aspects of molecular function, biological process, and cellular component. Detailed data analyses showed that the major advantage of ATGO lies in the utilization of pre-trained transformer language models which can extract discriminative functional pattern from the feature embeddings. Meanwhile, the proposed triplet network helps enhance the association of functional similarity with feature similarity in the sequence embedding space. In addition, it was found that the combination of the network scores with the complementary homology-based inferences could further improve the accuracy of the predicted models. These results demonstrated a new avenue for high-accuracy deep-learning function prediction that is applicable to large-scale protein function annotations from sequence alone.
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Affiliation(s)
- Yi-Heng Zhu
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America
| | - Chengxin Zhang
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America
| | - Dong-Jun Yu
- School of Computer Science and Engineering, Nanjing University of Science and Technology, Nanjing, People’s Republic of China
| | - Yang Zhang
- Department of Computational Medicine and Bioinformatics, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America
- Department of Biological Chemistry, University of Michigan, Ann Arbor, Michigan, United States of America
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Merino GA, Saidi R, Milone DH, Stegmayer G, Martin MJ. Hierarchical deep learning for predicting GO annotations by integrating protein knowledge. Bioinformatics 2022; 38:4488-4496. [PMID: 35929781 PMCID: PMC9524999 DOI: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btac536] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 07/13/2021] [Revised: 07/18/2022] [Indexed: 12/24/2022] Open
Abstract
MOTIVATION Experimental testing and manual curation are the most precise ways for assigning Gene Ontology (GO) terms describing protein functions. However, they are expensive, time-consuming and cannot cope with the exponential growth of data generated by high-throughput sequencing methods. Hence, researchers need reliable computational systems to help fill the gap with automatic function prediction. The results of the last Critical Assessment of Function Annotation challenge revealed that GO-terms prediction remains a very challenging task. Recent developments on deep learning are significantly breaking out the frontiers leading to new knowledge in protein research thanks to the integration of data from multiple sources. However, deep models hitherto developed for functional prediction are mainly focused on sequence data and have not achieved breakthrough performances yet. RESULTS We propose DeeProtGO, a novel deep-learning model for predicting GO annotations by integrating protein knowledge. DeeProtGO was trained for solving 18 different prediction problems, defined by the three GO sub-ontologies, the type of proteins, and the taxonomic kingdom. Our experiments reported higher prediction quality when more protein knowledge is integrated. We also benchmarked DeeProtGO against state-of-the-art methods on public datasets, and showed it can effectively improve the prediction of GO annotations. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION DeeProtGO and a case of use are available at https://github.com/gamerino/DeeProtGO. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Affiliation(s)
| | - Rabie Saidi
- European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge CB101SD, UK
| | - Diego H Milone
- Research Institute for Signals, Systems and Computational Intelligence (sinc(i)), FICH-UNL, CONICET, Ciudad Universitaria UNL, Santa Fe 3000, Argentina
| | - Georgina Stegmayer
- Research Institute for Signals, Systems and Computational Intelligence (sinc(i)), FICH-UNL, CONICET, Ciudad Universitaria UNL, Santa Fe 3000, Argentina
| | - Maria J Martin
- European Molecular Biology Laboratory, European Bioinformatics Institute (EMBL-EBI), Wellcome Genome Campus, Cambridge CB101SD, UK
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Qiu XY, Wu H, Shao J. TALE-cmap: Protein function prediction based on a TALE-based architecture and the structure information from contact map. Comput Biol Med 2022; 149:105938. [DOI: 10.1016/j.compbiomed.2022.105938] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 06/26/2022] [Revised: 07/26/2022] [Accepted: 08/06/2022] [Indexed: 11/03/2022]
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Jin C, Shi Z, Kang C, Lin K, Zhang H. TLCrys: Transfer Learning Based Method for Protein Crystallization Prediction. Int J Mol Sci 2022; 23:972. [PMID: 35055158 PMCID: PMC8778968 DOI: 10.3390/ijms23020972] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Grants] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 12/13/2021] [Revised: 01/05/2022] [Accepted: 01/14/2022] [Indexed: 11/17/2022] Open
Abstract
X-ray diffraction technique is one of the most common methods of ascertaining protein structures, yet only 2-10% of proteins can produce diffraction-quality crystals. Several computational methods have been proposed so far to predict protein crystallization. Nevertheless, the current state-of-the-art computational methods are limited by the scarcity of experimental data. Thus, the prediction accuracy of existing models hasn't reached the ideal level. To address the problems above, we propose a novel transfer-learning-based framework for protein crystallization prediction, named TLCrys. The framework proceeds in two steps: pre-training and fine-tuning. The pre-training step adopts attention mechanism to extract both global and local information of the protein sequences. The representation learned from the pre-training step is regarded as knowledge to be transferred and fine-tuned to enhance the performance of crystalization prediction. During pre-training, TLCrys adopts a multi-task learning method, which not only improves the learning ability of protein encoding, but also enhances the robustness and generalization of protein representation. The multi-head self-attention layer guarantees that different levels of the protein representation can be extracted by the fine-tuned step. During transfer learning, the fine-tuning strategy used by TLCrys improves the task-specialized learning ability of the network. Our method outperforms all previous predictors significantly in five crystallization stages of prediction. Furthermore, the proposed methodology can be well generalized to other protein sequence classification tasks.
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Affiliation(s)
- Chen Jin
- College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China; (C.J.); (C.K.)
| | - Zhuangwei Shi
- College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China; (Z.S.); (K.L.)
| | - Chuanze Kang
- College of Computer Science, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China; (C.J.); (C.K.)
| | - Ken Lin
- College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China; (Z.S.); (K.L.)
| | - Han Zhang
- College of Artificial Intelligence, Nankai University, Tianjin 300350, China; (Z.S.); (K.L.)
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Lundstrøm J, Korhonen E, Lisacek F, Bojar D. LectinOracle: A Generalizable Deep Learning Model for Lectin-Glycan Binding Prediction. ADVANCED SCIENCE (WEINHEIM, BADEN-WURTTEMBERG, GERMANY) 2022; 9:e2103807. [PMID: 34862760 PMCID: PMC8728848 DOI: 10.1002/advs.202103807] [Citation(s) in RCA: 5] [Impact Index Per Article: 2.5] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [MESH Headings] [Track Full Text] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 08/30/2021] [Revised: 11/03/2021] [Indexed: 05/07/2023]
Abstract
Ranging from bacterial cell adhesion over viral cell entry to human innate immunity, glycan-binding proteins or lectins are abound in nature. Widely used as staining and characterization reagents in cell biology and crucial for understanding the interactions in biological systems, lectins are a focal point of study in glycobiology. Yet the sheer breadth and depth of specificity for diverse oligosaccharide motifs has made studying lectins a largely piecemeal approach, with few options to generalize. Here, LectinOracle, a model combining transformer-based representations for proteins and graph convolutional neural networks for glycans to predict their interaction, is presented. Using a curated data set of 564,647 unique protein-glycan interactions, it is shown that LectinOracle predictions agree with literature-annotated specificities for a wide range of lectins. Using a range of specialized glycan arrays, it is shown that LectinOracle predictions generalize to new glycans and lectins, with qualitative and quantitative agreement with experimental data. It is further demonstrated that LectinOracle can be used to improve lectin classification, accelerate lectin directed evolution, predict epidemiological outcomes in the context of influenza virus, and analyze whole lectomes in host-microbe interactions. It is envisioned that the herein presented platform will advance both the study of lectins and their role in (glyco)biology.
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Affiliation(s)
- Jon Lundstrøm
- Department of Chemistry and Molecular BiologyUniversity of GothenburgGothenburg41390Sweden
- Wallenberg Centre for Molecular and Translational MedicineUniversity of GothenburgGothenburg41390Sweden
| | - Emma Korhonen
- Department of Chemistry and Molecular BiologyUniversity of GothenburgGothenburg41390Sweden
- Wallenberg Centre for Molecular and Translational MedicineUniversity of GothenburgGothenburg41390Sweden
| | - Frédérique Lisacek
- Swiss Institute of BioinformaticsGeneva1227Switzerland
- Computer Science DepartmentUniGeGeneva1227Switzerland
- Section of BiologyUniGeGeneva1205Switzerland
| | - Daniel Bojar
- Department of Chemistry and Molecular BiologyUniversity of GothenburgGothenburg41390Sweden
- Wallenberg Centre for Molecular and Translational MedicineUniversity of GothenburgGothenburg41390Sweden
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Abstract
Motivation Protein functions are often described using the Gene Ontology (GO) which is an ontology consisting of over 50 000 classes and a large set of formal axioms. Predicting the functions of proteins is one of the key challenges in computational biology and a variety of machine learning methods have been developed for this purpose. However, these methods usually require a significant amount of training data and cannot make predictions for GO classes that have only few or no experimental annotations. Results We developed DeepGOZero, a machine learning model which improves predictions for functions with no or only a small number of annotations. To achieve this goal, we rely on a model-theoretic approach for learning ontology embeddings and combine it with neural networks for protein function prediction. DeepGOZero can exploit formal axioms in the GO to make zero-shot predictions, i.e., predict protein functions even if not a single protein in the training phase was associated with that function. Furthermore, the zero-shot prediction method employed by DeepGOZero is generic and can be applied whenever associations with ontology classes need to be predicted. Availability and implementation http://github.com/bio-ontology-research-group/deepgozero. Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Affiliation(s)
- Maxat Kulmanov
- Computational Bioscience Research Center, Computer, Electrical and Mathematical Sciences & Engineering Division, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology (KAUST), Thuwal 23955-6900, Kingdom of Saudi Arabia
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Tong X, Liu S, Gu J, Wu C, Liang Y, Shi X. Amino acid environment affinity model based on graph attention network. J Bioinform Comput Biol 2021; 20:2150032. [PMID: 34775920 DOI: 10.1142/s0219720021500323] [Citation(s) in RCA: 0] [Impact Index Per Article: 0] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Indexed: 11/18/2022]
Abstract
Proteins are engines involved in almost all functions of life. They have specific spatial structures formed by twisting and folding of one or more polypeptide chains composed of amino acids. Protein sites are protein structure microenvironments that can be identified by three-dimensional locations and local neighborhoods in which the structure or function exists. Understanding the amino acid environment affinity is essential for additional protein structural or functional studies, such as mutation analysis and functional site detection. In this study, an amino acid environment affinity model based on the graph attention network was developed. Initially, we constructed a protein graph according to the distance between amino acid pairs. Then, we extracted a set of structural features for each node. Finally, the protein graph and the associated node feature set were set to input the graph attention network model and to obtain the amino acid affinities. Numerical results show that our proposed method significantly outperforms a recent 3DCNN-based method by almost 30%.
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Affiliation(s)
- Xueheng Tong
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Qianjing Street 2699, Changchun, Jilin 130012, China
| | - Shuqi Liu
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Qianjing Street 2699, Changchun, Jilin 130012, China
| | - Jiawei Gu
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Qianjing Street 2699, Changchun, Jilin 130012, China
| | - Chunguo Wu
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Qianjing Street 2699, Changchun, Jilin 130012, China
| | - Yanchun Liang
- School of Computer Science, Zhuhai College of Science and Technology Zhuhai, Guangdong 519041, China
| | - Xiaohu Shi
- College of Computer Science and Technology, Jilin University, Qianjing Street 2699, Changchun, Jilin 130012, China.,School of Computer Science, Zhuhai College of Science and Technology Zhuhai, Guangdong 519041, China
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Vu TTD, Jung J. Protein function prediction with gene ontology: from traditional to deep learning models. PeerJ 2021; 9:e12019. [PMID: 34513334 PMCID: PMC8395570 DOI: 10.7717/peerj.12019] [Citation(s) in RCA: 4] [Impact Index Per Article: 1.3] [Reference Citation Analysis] [Abstract] [Key Words] [Track Full Text] [Download PDF] [Figures] [Journal Information] [Subscribe] [Scholar Register] [Received: 04/13/2021] [Accepted: 07/29/2021] [Indexed: 11/25/2022] Open
Abstract
Protein function prediction is a crucial part of genome annotation. Prediction methods have recently witnessed rapid development, owing to the emergence of high-throughput sequencing technologies. Among the available databases for identifying protein function terms, Gene Ontology (GO) is an important resource that describes the functional properties of proteins. Researchers are employing various approaches to efficiently predict the GO terms. Meanwhile, deep learning, a fast-evolving discipline in data-driven approach, exhibits impressive potential with respect to assigning GO terms to amino acid sequences. Herein, we reviewed the currently available computational GO annotation methods for proteins, ranging from conventional to deep learning approach. Further, we selected some suitable predictors from among the reviewed tools and conducted a mini comparison of their performance using a worldwide challenge dataset. Finally, we discussed the remaining major challenges in the field, and emphasized the future directions for protein function prediction with GO.
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Affiliation(s)
- Thi Thuy Duong Vu
- Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Myongji University, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
| | - Jaehee Jung
- Department of Information and Communication Engineering, Myongji University, Yongin-si, Gyeonggi-do, South Korea
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