Cited by 20Protein Structure and DynamicsMachine Learning in BioinformaticsComputational Drug Discovery Methods

Protein language model-embedded geometric graphs power inter-protein contact prediction

Open access
Si, Yunda, Yan, Chengfei·2024·eLife

Published version of a preprint

Abstract

Accurate prediction of contacting residue pairs between interacting proteins is very useful for structural characterization of protein–protein interactions. Although significant improvement has been made in inter-protein contact prediction recently, there is still a large room for improving the prediction accuracy. Here we present a new deep learning method referred to as PLMGraph-Inter for inter-protein contact prediction. Specifically, we employ rotationally and translationally invariant geometric graphs obtained from structures of interacting proteins to integrate multiple protein language models, which are successively transformed by graph encoders formed by geometric vector perceptrons and residual networks formed by dimensional hybrid residual blocks to predict inter-protein contacts. Extensive evaluation on multiple test sets illustrates that PLMGraph-Inter outperforms five top inter-protein contact prediction methods, including DeepHomo, GLINTER, CDPred, DeepHomo2, and DRN-1D2D_Inter, by large margins. In addition, we also show that the prediction of PLMGraph-Inter can complement the result of AlphaFold-Multimer. Finally, we show leveraging the contacts predicted by PLMGraph-Inter as constraints for protein–protein docking can dramatically improve its performance for protein complex structure prediction.

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Authors
Si, Y., & Yan, C.
Affiliations
Huazhong University of Science and Technology (CN)
Corresponding author
Yan, Chengfei
Venue
eLife
Published
2024-04-02
Volume
12
ISSN
2050-084X (ISSN-L)
OpenAlex
W4389614980
Cited by
20
References
10
Citations by year
2026: 7 · 2025: 8 · 2024: 4 · 2023: 1
FWCI
1.78
Type
journal article
Language
en
Open access
Locations
  • eLife (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed Central (publishedVersion, cc-by)
  • PubMed (publishedVersion)
  • DOAJ (DOAJ: Directory of Open Access Journals) (submittedVersion)
Funders
  • National Natural Science Foundation of China (32101001)
  • Huazhong University of Science and Technology (3004012167)
Topics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Protein Structure and Dynamics
  • Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
  • Physical Sciences › Computer Science › Computational Theory and Mathematics › Computational Drug Discovery Methods
Keywords
protein-protein interaction, protein language models, geometric graphs, graph neural networks, AlphaFold-Multimer, protein complex structure prediction, protein-protein docking
MeSH terms
Language, Neural Networks, Computer

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