Deep graph learning of inter-protein contacts.

Abstract

Inter-protein (interfacial) contact prediction is very useful for in silico structural characterization of protein-protein interactions. Although deep learning has been applied to this problem, its accuracy is not as good as intra-protein contact prediction. We propose a new deep learning method GLINTER (Graph Learning of INTER-protein contacts) for interfacial contact prediction of dimers, leveraging a rotational invariant representation of protein tertiary structures and a pretrained language model of multiple sequence alignments. Tested on the 13th and 14th CASP-CAPRI datasets, the average top L/10 precision achieved by GLINTER is 54% on the homodimers and 52% on all the dimers, much higher than 30% obtained by the latest deep learning method DeepHomo on the homodimers and 15% obtained by BIPSPI on all the dimers. Our experiments show that GLINTER-predicted contacts help improve selection of docking decoys. The software is available at https://github.com/zw2x/glinter. The datasets are available at https://github.com/zw2x/glinter/data. Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.