skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Title: Are 2D fingerprints still valuable for drug discovery?
Recently, molecular fingerprints extracted from three-dimensional (3D) structures using advanced mathematics, such as algebraic topology, differential geometry, and graph theory have been paired with efficient machine learning, especially deep learning algorithms to outperform other methods in drug discovery applications and competitions. This raises the question of whether classical 2D fingerprints are still valuable in computer-aided drug discovery. This work considers 23 datasets associated with four typical problems, namely protein–ligand binding, toxicity, solubility and partition coefficient to assess the performance of eight 2D fingerprints. Advanced machine learning algorithms including random forest, gradient boosted decision tree, single-task deep neural network and multitask deep neural network are employed to construct efficient 2D-fingerprint based models. Additionally, appropriate consensus models are built to further enhance the performance of 2D-fingerprint-based methods. It is demonstrated that 2D-fingerprint-based models perform as well as the state-of-the-art 3D structure-based models for the predictions of toxicity, solubility, partition coefficient and protein–ligand binding affinity based on only ligand information. However, 3D structure-based models outperform 2D fingerprint-based methods in complex-based protein–ligand binding affinity predictions.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
1900473 1761320 1721024
PAR ID:
10170691
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ; ; ;
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Physical Chemistry Chemical Physics
Volume:
22
Issue:
16
ISSN:
1463-9076
Page Range / eLocation ID:
8373 to 8390
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
More Like this
  1. ABSTRACT Predicting the structure of ligands bound to proteins is a foundational problem in modern biotechnology and drug discovery, yet little is known about how to combine the predictions of protein‐ligand structure (poses) produced by the latest deep learning methods to identify the best poses and how to accurately estimate the binding affinity between a protein target and a list of ligand candidates. Further, a blind benchmarking and assessment of protein‐ligand structure and binding affinity prediction is necessary to ensure it generalizes well to new settings. Towards this end, we introduceMULTICOM_ligand, a deep learning‐based protein‐ligand structure and binding affinity prediction ensemble featuring structural consensus ranking for unsupervised pose ranking and a new deep generative flow matching model for joint structure and binding affinity prediction. Notably,MULTICOM_ligand ranked among the top‐5 ligand prediction methods in both protein‐ligand structure prediction and binding affinity prediction in the 16th Critical Assessment of Techniques for Structure Prediction (CASP16), demonstrating its efficacy and utility for real‐world drug discovery efforts. The source code for MULTICOM_ligand is freely available on GitHub. 
    more » « less
  2. Abstract A machine learning-based drug screening technique has been developed and optimized using convolutional neural network-derived fingerprints. The optimization of weights in the neural network-based fingerprinting technique was compared with fixed Morgan fingerprints in regard to binary classification on drug-target binding affinity. The assessment was carried out using six different target proteins using randomly chosen small molecules from the ZINC15 database for training. This new architecture proved to be more efficient in screening molecules that less favorably bind to specific targets and retaining molecules that favorably bind to it. Scientific contribution We have developed a new neural fingerprint-based screening model that has a significant ability to capture hits. Despite using a smaller dataset, this model is capable of mapping chemical space similar to other contemporary algorithms designed for molecular screening. The novelty of the present algorithm lies in the speed with which the models are trained and tuned before testing its predictive capabilities and hence is a significant step forward in the field of machine learning-embedded computational drug discovery. 
    more » « less
  3. Abstract New drug production, from target identification to marketing approval, takes over 12 years and can cost around $2.6 billion. Furthermore, the COVID-19 pandemic has unveiled the urgent need for more powerful computational methods for drug discovery. Here, we review the computational approaches to predicting protein–ligand interactions in the context of drug discovery, focusing on methods using artificial intelligence (AI). We begin with a brief introduction to proteins (targets), ligands (e.g. drugs) and their interactions for nonexperts. Next, we review databases that are commonly used in the domain of protein–ligand interactions. Finally, we survey and analyze the machine learning (ML) approaches implemented to predict protein–ligand binding sites, ligand-binding affinity and binding pose (conformation) including both classical ML algorithms and recent deep learning methods. After exploring the correlation between these three aspects of protein–ligand interaction, it has been proposed that they should be studied in unison. We anticipate that our review will aid exploration and development of more accurate ML-based prediction strategies for studying protein–ligand interactions. 
    more » « less
  4. Abstract Motivation:Despite its great success in various physical modeling, differential geometry (DG) has rarely been devised as a versatile tool for analyzing large, diverse, and complex molecular and biomolecular datasets because of the limited understanding of its potential power in dimensionality reduction and its ability to encode essential chemical and biological information in differentiable manifolds. Results:We put forward a differential geometry‐based geometric learning (DG‐GL) hypothesis that the intrinsic physics of three‐dimensional (3D) molecular structures lies on a family of low‐dimensional manifolds embedded in a high‐dimensional data space. We encode crucial chemical, physical, and biological information into 2D element interactive manifolds, extracted from a high‐dimensional structural data space via a multiscale discrete‐to‐continuum mapping using differentiable density estimators. Differential geometry apparatuses are utilized to construct element interactive curvatures in analytical forms for certain analytically differentiable density estimators. These low‐dimensional differential geometry representations are paired with a robust machine learning algorithm to showcase their descriptive and predictive powers for large, diverse, and complex molecular and biomolecular datasets. Extensive numerical experiments are carried out to demonstrate that the proposed DG‐GL strategy outperforms other advanced methods in the predictions of drug discovery‐related protein‐ligand binding affinity, drug toxicity, and molecular solvation free energy. Availability and implementation:http://weilab.math.msu.edu/DG‐GL/ Contact:wei@math.msu.edu 
    more » « less
  5. Identifying novel drug-target interactions is a critical and rate-limiting step in drug discovery. While deep learning models have been proposed to accelerate the identification process, here we show that state-of-the-art models fail to generalize to novel (i.e., never-before-seen) structures. We unveil the mechanisms responsible for this shortcoming, demonstrating how models rely on shortcuts that leverage the topology of the protein-ligand bipartite network, rather than learning the node features. Here we introduce AI-Bind, a pipeline that combines network-based sampling strategies with unsupervised pre-training to improve binding predictions for novel proteins and ligands. We validate AI-Bind predictions via docking simulations and comparison with recent experimental evidence, and step up the process of interpreting machine learning prediction of protein-ligand binding by identifying potential active binding sites on the amino acid sequence. AI-Bind is a high-throughput approach to identify drug-target combinations with the potential of becoming a powerful tool in drug discovery. 
    more » « less