Improving AlphaFold2-based protein tertiary structure prediction with MULTICOM in CASP15
Open accessPublished version of a preprint
Abstract
Since the 14th Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP14), AlphaFold2 has become the standard method for protein tertiary structure prediction. One remaining challenge is to further improve its prediction. We developed a new version of the MULTICOM system to sample diverse multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) and structural templates to improve the input for AlphaFold2 to generate structural models. The models are then ranked by both the pairwise model similarity and AlphaFold2 self-reported model quality score. The top ranked models are refined by a novel structure alignment-based refinement method powered by Foldseek. Moreover, for a monomer target that is a subunit of a protein assembly (complex), MULTICOM integrates tertiary and quaternary structure predictions to account for tertiary structural changes induced by protein-protein interaction. The system participated in the tertiary structure prediction in 2022 CASP15 experiment. Our server predictor MULTICOM_refine ranked 3rd among 47 CASP15 server predictors and our human predictor MULTICOM ranked 7th among all 132 human and server predictors. The average GDT-TS score and TM-score of the first structural models that MULTICOM_refine predicted for 94 CASP15 domains are ~0.80 and ~0.92, 9.6% and 8.2% higher than ~0.73 and 0.85 of the standard AlphaFold2 predictor respectively.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
Jumper, J., Evans, R., Pritzel, A., Green, T., Figurnov, M., Ronneberger, O., Tunyasuvunakool, K., Bates, R., Žídek, A., Potapenko, A., et al. (2021) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2 · Cited by 43,764 · see citing works
ColabFold - Making protein folding accessible to all
Mirdita, M., Schütze, K., Moriwaki, Y., Heo, L., Ovchinnikov, S., & Steinegger, M. (2021) · doi:10.1101/2021.08.15.456425 · Cited by 9,391 · see citing works
Protein complex prediction with AlphaFold-Multimer
Evans, R., O’Neill, M., Pritzel, A., Antropova, N., Senior, A., Green, T., Žídek, A., Bates, R., Blackwell, S., Yim, J., et al. (2021) · doi:10.1101/2021.10.04.463034 · Cited by 3,808 · see citing works
Highly accurate protein structure prediction for the human proteome
Tunyasuvunakool, K., Adler, J., Wu, Z., Green, T., Zielinski, M., Žídek, A., Bridgland, A., Cowie, A., Meyer, C., Laydon, A., et al. (2021) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03828-1 · Cited by 3,025 · cited 2× · see citing works
“An initial structural model is used as input for Foldseek to search for similar structures in the PDB_sort90 template database and the AlphaFoldDB (the version released before March 2022).”
MethodFast and accurate protein structure search with Foldseek
van Kempen, M., Kim, S. S., Tumescheit, C., Mirdita, M., Lee, J., Gilchrist, C. L. M., Söding, J., & Steinegger, M. (2022) · doi:10.1101/2022.02.07.479398 · Cited by 2,598 · see citing works
Fast and accurate protein structure search with Foldseek
van Kempen, M., Kim, S. S., Tumescheit, C., Mirdita, M., Lee, J., Gilchrist, C. L. M., Söding, J., & Steinegger, M. (2024) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/s41587-023-01773-0 · Cited by 2,596 · see citing works
Protein-level assembly increases protein sequence recovery from metagenomic samples manyfold
Steinegger, M., Mirdita, M., & Söding, J. (2019) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/s41592-019-0437-4 · Cited by 445 · see citing works
High‐accuracy protein structure prediction in <scp>CASP14</scp>
Pereira, J., Simpkin, A. J., Hartmann, M. D., Rigden, D. J., Keegan, R. M., & Lupas, A. N. (2021) · Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics · doi:10.1002/prot.26171 · Cited by 314 · see citing works
Assessing the utility of <scp>CASP14</scp> models for molecular replacement
Millán, C., Keegan, R. M., Pereira, J., Sammito, M. D., Simpkin, A. J., McCoy, A. J., Lupas, A. N., Hartmann, M. D., Rigden, D. J., & Read, R. J. (2021) · Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics · doi:10.1002/prot.26214 · Cited by 62 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
- Authors
- Liu, J., Guo, Z., Wu, T., Roy, R. S., Chen, C., & Cheng, J.
- Affiliations
- University of Missouri (US)
- Corresponding author
- Cheng, Jianlin
- Venue
- Communications Chemistry
- Published
- 2023-09-07
- Volume
- 6
- Issue
- 1
- Pages
- 188-188
- ISSN
- 2399-3669 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC10484931
- OpenAlex
- W4386525930
- Cited by
- 31
- References
- 9
- Citations by year
- 2026: 5 · 2025: 11 · 2024: 11 · 2023: 4
- FWCI
- 2.75
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- gold
- doi.org
- Locations
- Communications Chemistry (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) (acceptedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Research Square (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion)
- DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion, cc-by-sa)
- Funders
- U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | National Institutes of Health (R01GM093123 and R01GM146340)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Protein Structure and Dynamics
- Physical Sciences › Materials Science › Materials Chemistry › Enzyme Structure and Function
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
- Keywords
- protein tertiary structure prediction, AlphaFold2, structural templates, model ranking, Foldseek, quaternary structure prediction, protein-protein interaction, protein complexes, CASP15
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
