An interpretable alphabet for local protein structure search based on amino acid neighborhoods.
basic_science · Level V
Where this comes from
- Record sourced from PubMed, PMID 40848287.
- Also identified by DOI 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaf458 and PMC identifier 12516309.
- Licence recorded as CC BY.
- The licence permits redistribution, so the abstract is shown in full and the full text is available from the publisher.
Abstract
Recent advancements in protein structure prediction methods have vastly increased the size of databases of protein structures, necessitating fast methods for protein structure comparison. Search methods that find structurally similar proteins can be applied to find remote homologs, study the functional relationships among proteins, and aid in protein engineering tasks. We design a "3Dn" structural alphabet that encodes the local neighborhoods around each amino acid in an interpretable way. In a search benchmark task, a combination of our alphabet and Foldseek's 3Di alphabet, outperforms each alphabet individually and ranks best among local search methods that do not require amino acid identity information. We provide software tools that enable the exploration of novel alphabets and combinations of alphabets for protein structure search. The code is freely available at https://github.com/spetti/structure_comparison and at Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15734371.
Medical subject headings
- Proteins
- Software
- Amino Acids
- Computational Biology