March 7, 2024
Deep learning has made significant progress in protein structure prediction, advancing the development of computational biology. However, despite the high accuracy achieved in predicting single-chain structures, a significant number of large homo-oligomeric assemblies exhibit internal symmetry, posing a major challenge in structure determination. The performances of existing deep learning methods are limited since the symmetrical protein assembly usually has a long sequence, ...
October 27, 2023
The most popular and universally predictive protein simulation models employ all-atom molecular dynamics (MD), but they come at extreme computational cost. The development of a universal, computationally efficient coarse-grained (CG) model with similar prediction performance has been a long-standing challenge. By combining recent deep learning methods with a large and diverse training set of all-atom protein simulations, we here develop a bottom-up CG force field with chemica...
May 25, 2023
Inverse protein folding -- the task of predicting a protein sequence from its backbone atom coordinates -- has surfaced as an important problem in the "top down", de novo design of proteins. Contemporary approaches have cast this problem as a conditional generative modelling problem, where a large generative model over protein sequences is conditioned on the backbone. While these generative models very rapidly produce promising sequences, independent draws from generative mod...
September 17, 2023
Protein folding is the intricate process by which a linear sequence of amino acids self-assembles into a unique three-dimensional structure. Protein folding kinetics is the study of pathways and time-dependent mechanisms a protein undergoes when it folds. Understanding protein kinetics is essential as a protein needs to fold correctly for it to perform its biological functions optimally, and a misfolded protein can sometimes be contorted into shapes that are not ideal for a c...
November 10, 2023
Proteins populate a manifold in the high-dimensional sequence space whose geometrical structure guides their natural evolution. Leveraging recently-developed structure prediction tools based on transformer models, we first examine the protein sequence landscape as defined by the folding score function. This landscape shares characteristics with optimization challenges encountered in machine learning and constraint satisfaction problems. Our analysis reveals that natural prote...
June 20, 2023
Developing accurate and efficient coarse-grained representations of proteins is crucial for understanding their folding, function, and interactions over extended timescales. Our methodology involves simulating proteins with molecular dynamics and utilizing the resulting trajectories to train a neural network potential through differentiable trajectory reweighting. Remarkably, this method requires only the native conformation of proteins, eliminating the need for labeled data ...
October 20, 2023
An amino acid insertion or deletion, or InDel, can have profound and varying functional impacts on a protein's structure. InDel mutations in the transmembrane conductor regulator protein for example give rise to cystic fibrosis. Unfortunately performing InDel mutations on physical proteins and studying their effects is a time prohibitive process. Consequently, modeling InDels computationally can supplement and inform wet lab experiments. In this work, we make use of our data ...
October 10, 2023
Numerous cellular functions rely on protein$\unicode{x2013}$protein interactions. Efforts to comprehensively characterize them remain challenged however by the diversity of molecular recognition mechanisms employed within the proteome. Deep learning has emerged as a promising approach for tackling this problem by exploiting both experimental data and basic biophysical knowledge about protein interactions. Here, we review the growing ecosystem of deep learning methods for mode...
February 29, 2024
Proteins are essential for life, and their structure determines their function. The protein secondary structure is formed by the folding of the protein primary structure, and the protein tertiary structure is formed by the bending and folding of the secondary structure. Therefore, the study of protein secondary structure is very helpful to the overall understanding of protein structure. Although the accuracy of protein secondary structure prediction has continuously improved ...
May 23, 2024
The effects of ligand binding on protein structures and their in vivo functions carry numerous implications for modern biomedical research and biotechnology development efforts such as drug discovery. Although several deep learning (DL) methods and benchmarks designed for protein-ligand docking have recently been introduced, to date no prior works have systematically studied the behavior of docking methods within the practical context of (1) using predicted (apo) protein stru...