ESMDisPred: A Structure-Aware CNN-Transformer Architecture for Intrinsically Disordered Protein Prediction

Abstract

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) lack stable three-dimensional structures, yet play vital roles in key biological processes, including signaling, transcription regulation, and molecular scaffolding. Their structural flexibility presents significant challenges for experimental characterization and contributes to diseases such as cancer and neurodegenerative disorders. Accurate computational prediction of IDPs is important for advancing research and drug discovery, structural biology, and protein engineering. In this study, we introduce ESMDisPred, a novel structure-aware disorder predictor that builds on the representational power of Evolutionary Scale Modeling-2 (ESM2) protein language models. ESMDisPred integrates sequence embeddings with structural information from the Protein Data Bank (PDB) to deliver state-of-the-art prediction accuracy. Model performance is further enhanced through feature engineering strategies, including terminal residue encoding, statistical summarization, and sliding-window analysis. To capture both local sequence motifs and long-range dependencies, we designed a hybrid CNN-Transformer architecture that balances convolutional efficiency with the representational power of self-attention. On CAID3 benchmarks, our latest model achieves ROC-AUC 0.895, AP 0.778, and a max F1 of 0.759, outperforming recent methods. Our results highlight the importance of integrating protein language model embeddings with explicit structural information for improved disorder prediction.