Cited by 50Machine Learning in BioinformaticsProtein Structure and DynamicsGenomics and Chromatin Dynamics

Improving prediction performance of general protein language model by domain-adaptive pretraining on DNA-binding protein

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Zeng, Wenwu, Dou, Yutao, Pan, Liangrui, Xu, Liwen, Peng, Shaoliang·2024·Nature Communications

Published version of a preprint

Abstract

ABSTRACT DNA-protein interactions exert the fundamental structure of many pivotal biological processes, such as DNA replication, transcription, and gene regulation. However, accurate and efficient computational methods for identifying these interactions are still lacking. In this study, we propose a novel method ESM-DBP through refining the DNA-binding protein (DBP) sequence repertory and domain-adaptive pretraining based the protein language model (PLM). Our method considers the lack of exploration of general PLM for DBP domain-specific knowledge, so we screened out 170,264 DBPs from the UniProtKB database to construct the model that more suitable for learning crucial characteristics of DBP. The evaluation of ESM-DBP is systematically performed in four different DBP-related downstream prediction tasks, i.e., DNA-binding protein, DNA-binding residue, transcription factor, and DNA-binding Cys2His2 zinc-finger predictions. Experimental results show that ESM-DBP provides a better feature representation of DBP compared to the original PLM, resulting in improved prediction performance and outperforming other state-of-the-art prediction methods. In addition, ESM-DBP incorporates the integrated gradient algorithm for interpretable analysis, which usually ignored in the previous methods. It reveals that ESM-DBP possesses high sensitivity to the key decisive DNA-binding domains. Moreover, we find that ESM-DBP can still perform well even for those DBPs with only a few similar homologous sequences, and this generalization performs better than the original PLM. The data and standalone program of ESM-DBP are freely accessible at https://github.com/pengsl-lab/ESM-DBP .

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Authors
Zeng, W., Dou, Y., Pan, L., Xu, L., & Peng, S.
Affiliations
Hunan University (CN)
Corresponding author
  • Xu, Liwen
  • Peng, Shaoliang
Venue
Nature Communications
Published
2024-09-07
Volume
15
Issue
1
Pages
7838-7838
ISSN
2041-1723 (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4402329624
Cited by
49
References
87
Citations by year
2026: 21 · 2025: 27 · 2024: 1
FWCI
6.67
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • Nature Communications (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • RePEc: Research Papers in Economics (submittedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
Funders
  • Innovative Research Group Project of the National Natural Science Foundation of China
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (62361166662)
  • Fundo para o Desenvolvimento das Ciências e da Tecnologia
  • State Key Laboratory of Chemo/Biosensing and Chemometrics
  • National Supercomputing Center, Korea Institute of Science and Technology Information
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Protein Structure and Dynamics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Chromatin Dynamics
Keywords
DNA-binding proteins, protein-DNA interactions, protein language models, domain-adaptive pretraining, protein sequence representation, protein function prediction, protein-DNA binding prediction
MeSH terms
Protein Domains, Algorithms, DNA, DNA-Binding Proteins, Humans, Protein Binding, Computational Biology

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