Biology subjects

Quadir, F.

Publications and source records attributed to Quadir, F..

6 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2023

Enhancing AlphaFold-Multimer-based Protein Complex Structure Prediction with MULTICOM in CASP15

AlphaFold-Multimer has emerged as the state-of-the-art tool for predicting the quaternary structure of protein complexes (assemblies or multimers) since its release in 2021. To further enhance the AlphaFold-Multimer-based complex structure prediction, we developed a new quaternary structure prediction system (MULTICOM) to improve the input fed to AlphaFold-Multimer and evaluate and refine the outputs generated by AlphaFold2-Multimer. Specifically, MULTICOM samples diverse multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) and templates for AlphaFold-Multimer to generate structural models by using both traditional sequence alignments and new Foldseek-based structure alignments, ranks structural models through multiple complementary metrics, and refines the structural models via a Foldseek structure alignment-based refinement method. The MULTICOM system with different implementations was blindly tested in the assembly structure prediction in the 15th Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (CASP15) in 2022 as both server and human predictors. Our server (MULTICOM_qa) ranked 3rd among 26 CASP15 server predictors and our human predictor (MULTICOM_human) ranked 7th among 87 CASP15 server and human predictors. The average TM-score of the first models predicted by MULTICOM_qa for CASP15 assembly targets is [~]0.76, 5.3% higher than [~]0.72 of the standard AlphaFold-Multimer. The average TM-score of the best of top 5 models predicted by MULTICOM_qa is [~]0.80, about 8% higher than [~]0.74 of the standard AlphaFold-Multimer. Moreover, the novel Foldseek Structure Alignment-based Model Generation (FSAMG) method based on AlphaFold-Multimer outperforms the widely used sequence alignment-based model generation. The source code of MULTICOM is available at: https://github.com/BioinfoMachineLearning/MULTICOM3.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2022

A deep reinforcement learning approach to reconstructing quaternary structures of protein dimers through self-learning

Predicted interchain residue-residue contacts can be used to build the quaternary structure of protein complexes from scratch. However, only a small number of methods have been developed to reconstruct protein quaternary structures using predicted interchain contacts. Here, we present an agent-based self-learning method based on deep reinforcement learning (DRLComplex) to build protein complex structures using interchain contacts as distance constraints. We rigorously tested the DRLComplex on two standard datasets of homodimeric and heterodimeric dimers (the CASP-CAPRI homodimer dataset and Std_32 heterodimer dataset) using both true and predicted contacts. Utilizing true contacts as input, the DRLComplex achieved a high average TM-score of 0.9895 and 0.9881 and a low average interface RMSD (I_RMSD) of 0.2197 and 0.92 on the two datasets, respectively. When predicted contacts are used, the method achieves the TM-score of 0.73 and 0.76 for homodimers and heterodimers respectively. The accuracy of reconstructed quaternary structures depends on the accuracy of contact predictions. Compared with other optimization methods of reconstructing quaternary structures from interchain contacts, DRLComplex performs similarly to an advanced gradient descent method and better than a Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation method and a simulated annealing-based method. The source code of DRLComplex is available at: https://github.com/jianlin-cheng/DRLComplex

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2022

Multi-Head Attention-based U-Nets for Predicting Protein Domain Boundaries Using 1D Sequence Features and 2D Distance Maps

The information about the domain architecture of proteins is useful for studying protein structure and function. However, accurate prediction of protein domain boundaries (i.e., sequence regions separating two domains) from sequence remains a significant challenge. In this work, we develop a deep learning method based on multi-head U-Nets (called DistDom) to predict protein domain boundaries utilizing 1D sequence features and predicted 2D inter-residue distance map as input. The 1D features contain the evolutionary and physicochemical information of protein sequences, whereas the 2D distance map includes the structural information of proteins that was rarely used in domain boundary prediction before. The 1D and 2D features are processed by the 1D and 2D U-Nets respectively to generate hidden features. The hidden features are then used by the multi-head attention to predict the probability of each residue of a protein being in a domain boundary, leveraging both local and global information in the features. The residue-level domain boundary predictions can be used to classify proteins as single-domain or multi-domain proteins. It classifies the CASP14 single-domain and multi-domain targets at the accuracy of 69.1%, 2.67% more accurate than the state-of-the-art method. Tested on the CASP14 multi-domain protein targets with expert annotated domain boundaries, the average per-target F1 measure score of the domain boundary prediction by DistDom is 0.263, 29.56% higher than the state-of-the-art method.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2021

A deep dilated convolutional residual network for predicting interchain contacts of protein homodimers

MotivationDeep learning has revolutionized protein tertiary structure prediction recently. The cutting-edge deep learning methods such as AlphaFold can predict high-accuracy tertiary structures for most individual protein chains. However, the accuracy of predicting quaternary structures of protein complexes consisting of multiple chains is still relatively low due to lack of advanced deep learning methods in the field. Because interchain residue-residue contacts can be used as distance restraints to guide quaternary structure modeling, here we develop a deep dilated convolutional residual network method (DRCon) to predict interchain residue-residue contacts in homodimers from residue-residue co-evolutionary signals derived from multiple sequence alignments of monomers, intrachain residue-residue contacts of monomers extracted from true/predicted tertiary structures or predicted by deep learning, and other sequence and structural features. ResultsTested on three homodimer test datasets (Homo_std dataset, DeepHomo dataset, and CASP14-CAPRI dataset), the precision of DRCon for top L/5 interchain contact predictions (L: length of monomer in a homodimer) is 43.46%, 47.15%, and 24.81% respectively, which is substantially better than two existing deep learning interchain contact prediction methods. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate that using predicted tertiary structure or intrachain contacts of monomers in the unbound state as input, DRCon still performs reasonably well, even though its accuracy is lower than when true tertiary structures in the bound state are used as input. Finally, our case study shows that good interchain contact predictions can be used to build high-accuracy quaternary structure models of homodimers. AvailabilityThe source code of DRCon is available at https://github.com/jianlin-cheng/DRCon. Contactchengji@missouri.edu

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2021

Distance-based Reconstruction of Protein Quaternary Structures from Inter-Chain Contacts

Predicting the quaternary structure of a protein complex is an important and challenging problem. Inter-chain residue-residue contact prediction can provide useful information to guide the ab initio reconstruction of quaternary structures of protein complexes. However, few methods have been developed to build quaternary structures from predicted inter-chain contacts. Here, we introduce a new gradient descent optimization algorithm (GD) to build quaternary structures of protein dimers utilizing inter-chain contacts as distance restraints. We evaluate GD on several datasets of homodimers and heterodimers using true or predicted contacts. GD consistently performs better than a simulated annealing method and a Markov Chain Monte Carlo simulation method. Using true inter-chain contacts as input, GD can reconstruct high-quality structural models for homodimers and heterodimers with average TM-score ranging from 0.92 to 0.99 and average interface root mean square distance (I-RMSD) from 0.72 [A] to 1.64 [A]. On a dataset of 115 homodimers, using predicted inter-chain contacts as input, the average TM-score of the structural models built by GD is 0.76. For 46% of the homodimers, high-quality structural models with TM-score >= 0.9 are reconstructed from predicted contacts. There is a strong correlation between the quality of the reconstructed models and the precision and recall of predicted contacts. If the precision or recall of predicted contacts is >20%, GD can reconstruct good models for most homodimers, indicating only a moderate precision or recall of inter-chain contact prediction is needed to build good structural models for most homodimers. Moreover, the accuracy of reconstructed models positively correlates with the contact density in dimers and depends on the initial model and the probability threshold of selecting predicted contacts for the distance-based structure optimization.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2020

Predicting interchain contacts for homodimeric and homomultimeric protein complexes using multiple sequence alignments of monomers and deep learning

Deep learning methods that achieved great success in predicting intrachain residue-residue contacts have been applied to predict interchain contacts between proteins. However, these methods require multiple sequence alignments (MSAs) of a pair of interacting proteins (dimers) as input, which are often difficult to obtain because there are not many known protein complexes available to generate MSAs of sufficient depth for a pair of proteins. In recognizing that multiple sequence alignments of a monomer that forms homomultimers contain the co-evolutionary signals of both intrachain and interchain residue pairs in contact, we applied DNCON2 (a deep learning-based protein intrachain residue-residue contact predictor) to predict both intrachain and interchain contacts for homomultimers using multiple sequence alignment (MSA) and other co-evolutionary features of a single monomer followed by discrimination of interchain and intrachain contacts according to the tertiary structure of the monomer. Allowing true-positive predictions within two residue shifts, the best average precision was obtained for the Top-L/10 predictions of DNCON2: 22.9% for homodimers, and 17.0% for higher order homomultimers. In some instances, especially where interchain contact densities are high, the approach predicted interchain contacts with 100% precision. We show that the predicted contacts can be used to accurately construct the structure of some complexes. Our experiment demonstrates that monomeric multiple sequence alignments can be used with deep learning to predict interchain contacts of homomeric proteins.

bioinformatics↗