Precise estimation of residue relative solvent accessible area from Cα atom distance matrix using a deep learning method.

Abstract

The solvent accessible surface is an essential structural property measure related to the protein structure and protein function. Relative solvent accessible area (RSA) is a standard measure to describe the degree of residue exposure in the protein surface or inside of protein. However, this computation will fail when the residues information is missing. In this article, we proposed a novel method for estimation RSA using the Cα atom distance matrix with the deep learning method (EAGERER). The new method, EAGERER, achieves Pearson correlation coefficients of 0.921-0.928 on two independent test datasets. We empirically demonstrate that EAGERER can yield better Pearson correlation coefficients than existing RSA estimators, such as coordination number, half sphere exposure and SphereCon. To the best of our knowledge, EAGERER represents the first method to estimate the solvent accessible area using limited information with a deep learning model. It could be useful to the protein structure and protein function prediction. The method is free available at https://github.com/cliffgao/EAGERER. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.