October 28, 2020
Despite considerable progress, ab initio protein structure prediction remains suboptimal. A crowdsourcing approach is the online puzzle video game Foldit, that provided several useful results that matched or even outperformed algorithmically computed solutions. Using Foldit, the WeFold crowd had several successful participations in the Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction. Based on the recent Foldit standalone version, we trained a deep reinforce...
November 8, 2018
Contact-assisted protein folding has made very good progress, but two challenges remain. One is accurate contact prediction for proteins lack of many sequence homologs and the other is that time-consuming folding simulation is often needed to predict good 3D models from predicted contacts. We show that protein distance matrix can be predicted well by deep learning and then directly used to construct 3D models without folding simulation at all. Using distance geometry to const...
November 22, 2019
Many aspects of the study of protein folding and dynamics have been affected by the recent advances in machine learning. Methods for the prediction of protein structures from their sequences are now heavily based on machine learning tools. The way simulations are performed to explore the energy landscape of protein systems is also changing as force-fields are started to be designed by means of machine learning methods. These methods are also used to extract the essential info...
June 11, 2019
Given native 2D contact map, protein 3D structure could be reconstructed with accuracy of 2A or better, and such reconstruction is a feasible computational approach for protein folding problem. The prediction accuracy from traditional methods is generally too poor to useful, but the recent deep learning model has significantly improved the accuracy. In this study, we proposed a neural network model comprising a bi-directional recurrent neural network and artificial neural net...
January 22, 2018
Computational protein design has a wide variety of applications. Despite its remarkable success, designing a protein for a given structure and function is still a challenging task. On the other hand, the number of solved protein structures is rapidly increasing while the number of unique protein folds has reached a steady number, suggesting more structural information is being accumulated on each fold. Deep learning neural network is a powerful method to learn such big data s...
January 18, 2018
The computational prediction of a protein structure from its sequence generally relies on a method to assess the quality of protein models. Most assessment methods rank candidate models using heavily engineered structural features, defined as complex functions of the atomic coordinates. However, very few methods have attempted to learn these features directly from the data. We show that deep convolutional networks can be used to predict the ranking of model structures solely ...
November 19, 2018
In spite of decades of research, much remains to be discovered about folding: the detailed structure of the initial (unfolded) state, vestigial folding instructions remaining only in the unfolded state, the interaction of the molecule with the solvent, instantaneous power at each point within the molecule during folding, the fact that the process is stable in spite of myriad possible disturbances, potential stabilization of trajectory by chaos, and, of course, the exact physi...
June 4, 2017
Motivation Protein fold recognition is an important problem in structural bioinformatics. Almost all traditional fold recognition methods use sequence (homology) comparison to indirectly predict the fold of a tar get protein based on the fold of a template protein with known structure, which cannot explain the relationship between sequence and fold. Only a few methods had been developed to classify protein sequences into a small number of folds due to methodological limitat...
December 3, 2018
De novo protein structure prediction from amino acid sequence is one of the most challenging problems in computational biology. As one of the extensively explored mathematical models for protein folding, Hydrophobic-Polar (HP) model enables thorough investigation of protein structure formation and evolution. Although HP model discretizes the conformational space and simplifies the folding energy function, it has been proven to be an NP-complete problem. In this paper, we prop...
July 16, 2020
Deep learning is catalyzing a scientific revolution fueled by big data, accessible toolkits, and powerful computational resources, impacting many fields including protein structural modeling. Protein structural modeling, such as predicting structure from amino acid sequence and evolutionary information, designing proteins toward desirable functionality, or predicting properties or behavior of a protein, is critical to understand and engineer biological systems at the molecula...