Biology subjects

Atalay, V.

Publications and source records attributed to Atalay, V..

3 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

On the state of protein function prediction: a report on the fourth CAFA challenge

BackgroundThe Critical Assessment of Functional Annotation (CAFA) is a community effort held to understand the field of computational protein function prediction. Every three years, since 2010, the organizers initiate an experiment to collect function predictions on a large set of proteins and then evaluate the performance of predicting methods on a subset of proteins that have accumulated experimental annotations between the submission deadline and the evaluation time. CAFA provides an independent and rigorous assessment of the current state of the art, thus leveling the playing field, highlighting successes, revealing bottlenecks, and offering a forum for the exchange of ideas in protein science. Here, we report the results of the fourth CAFA experiment (CAFA4). ResultsCAFA4 featured the participation of 148 methods from 70 research groups on a total of 46,205 unique proteins over a 5-year annotation accumulation phase, the longest in any CAFA. In a comparison across CAFA2-CAFA4 methods, the prediction of Gene Ontology (GO) terms has clearly improved across all three GO aspects and traditional evaluation settings. While not achieving the first rank, several CAFA2 and CAFA3 methods featured in the top ten methods in many evaluations, suggesting that earlier methods still hold relevance. The performance is weaker in the newly introduced "partial knowledge" evaluation category (proteins with experimental annotations before submission deadline that gained additional annotations in the same GO aspect during the annotation accumulation phase), highlighting the need for a new class of methods. The rankings of the methods were stable over the years in traditional evaluation settings, but less so in the new partial knowledge evaluation. Overall, the field continues to progress with some influx of new participants. Sustained efforts will be necessary to substantially advance it.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2020

CROssBAR: Comprehensive Resource of Biomedical Relations with Deep Learning Applications and Knowledge Graph Representations

Systemic analysis of available large-scale biological and biomedical data is critical for developing novel and effective treatment approaches against both complex and infectious diseases. Owing to the fact that different sections of the biomedical data is produced by different organizations/institutions using various types of technologies, the data are scattered across individual computational resources, without any explicit relations/connections to each other, which greatly hinders the comprehensive multi-omics-based analysis of data. We aimed to address this issue by constructing a new biological and biomedical data resource, CROssBAR, a comprehensive system that integrates large-scale biomedical data from various resources and store them in a new NoSQL database, enrich these data with deep-learning-based prediction of relations between numerous biomedical entities, rigorously analyse the enriched data to obtain biologically meaningful modules and display them to users via easy-to-interpret, interactive and heterogenous knowledge graph (KG) representations within an open access, user-friendly and online web-service at https://crossbar.kansil.org. As a use-case study, we constructed CROssBAR COVID-19 KGs (available at: https://crossbar.kansil.org/covid_main.php) that incorporate relevant virus and host genes/proteins, interactions, pathways, phenotypes and other diseases, as well as known and completely new predicted drugs/compounds. Our COVID-19 graphs can be utilized for a systems-level evaluation of relevant virus-host protein interactions, mechanisms, phenotypic implications and potential interventions.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2018

DEEPScreen: High Performance Drug-Target Interaction Prediction with Convolutional Neural Networks Using 2-D Structural Compound Representations

The identification of physical interactions between drug candidate chemical substances and target biomolecules is an important step in the process of drug discovery, where the standard procedure is the systematic screening of chemical compounds against pre-selected target proteins. However, experimental screening procedures are expensive and time consuming, therefore, it is not possible to carry out comprehensive tests. Within the last decade, computational approaches have been developed with the objective of aiding experimental studies by predicting novel drug-target interactions (DTI), via the construction and application of statistical models. In this study, we propose a large-scale DTI interaction prediction system, DEEPScreen, for early stage drug discovery, using convolutional deep neural networks. One of the main advantages of DEEPScreen is employing readily available simple 2-D images of compounds at the input level instead of engineered complex feature vectors that displayed limited performance in DTI prediction tasks previously. DEEPScreen learns complex features inherently from the 2-D molecular representations, thus producing highly accurate predictions. DEEPScreen system was trained for 704 target proteins (using ChEMBL curated bioactivity data) and finalized with rigorous hyper-parameter optimization tests. We compared the performance of DEEPScreen against shallow classifiers such as the random forest, logistic regression and support vector machines, to indicate the effectiveness of the proposed deep learning approach. Additionally, we compared DEEPScreen with other deep learning based state-of-the-art DTI predictors on widely used benchmark datasets and showed that DEEPScreen produces better or comparable results to the top performers. The method proposed here can be employed to computationally scan a large portion of the recorded drug candidate compound and protein spaces to aid the experimentalists working in the field of drug discovery and repurposing by providing a preselection of interesting novel DTIs.

bioinformatics↗