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1. Small molecule generation via disentangled representation learning

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac296  

   Du, Yuanqi ; Guo, Xiaojie ; Wang, Yinkai ; Shehu, Amarda ; Zhao, Liang ; Xu, ed., Jinbo ( May 2022 , Bioinformatics)

   Expanding our knowledge of small molecules beyond what is known in nature or designed in wet laboratories promises to significantly advance cheminformatics, drug discovery, biotechnology and material science. In silico molecular design remains challenging, primarily due to the complexity of the chemical space and the non-trivial relationship between chemical structures and biological properties. Deep generative models that learn directly from data are intriguing, but they have yet to demonstrate interpretability in the learned representation, so we can learn more about the relationship between the chemical and biological space. In this article, we advance research on disentangled representation learning for small molecule generation. We build on recent work by us and others on deep graph generative frameworks, which capture atomic interactions via a graph-based representation of a small molecule. The methodological novelty is how we leverage the concept of disentanglement in the graph variational autoencoder framework both to generate biologically relevant small molecules and to enhance model interpretability.

   Extensive qualitative and quantitative experimental evaluation in comparison with state-of-the-art models demonstrate the superiority of our disentanglement framework. We believe this work is an important step to address key challenges in small molecule generation with deep generative frameworks.

   Training and generated data are made available at https://ieee-dataport.org/documents/dataset-disentangled-representation-learning-interpretable-molecule-generation. All code is made available at https://anonymous.4open.science/r/D-MolVAE-2799/.

   Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

    

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2. Deep Latent-Variable Models for Controllable Molecule Generation

   https://doi.org/10.1109/BIBM52615.2021.9669692  

   Du, Yuanqi ; Wang, Yinkai ; Alam, Fardina ; Lu, Yuanjie ; Guo, Xiaojie ; Zhao, Liang ; Shehu, Amarda ( January 2021 , 2021 IEEE International Conference on Bioinformatics and Biomedicine (BIBM))

   Representation learning via deep generative models is opening a new avenue for small molecule generation in silico. Linking chemical and biological space remains a key challenge. In this paper, we debut a graph-based variational autoencoder framework to address this challenge under the umbrella of disentangled representation learning. The framework permits several inductive biases that connect the learned latent factors to molecular properties. Evaluation on diverse benchmark datasets shows that the resulting models are powerful and open up an exciting line of research on controllable molecule generation in support of cheminformatics, drug discovery, and other application settings. 

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3. Cross-dependent graph neural networks for molecular property prediction

   https://doi.org/10.1093/bioinformatics/btac039  

   Ma, Hehuan ; Bian, Yatao ; Rong, Yu ; Huang, Wenbing ; Xu, Tingyang ; Xie, Weiyang ; Ye, Geyan ; Huang, Junzhou ; Lu, ed., Zhiyong ( January 2022 , Bioinformatics)

   The crux of molecular property prediction is to generate meaningful representations of the molecules. One promising route is to exploit the molecular graph structure through graph neural networks (GNNs). Both atoms and bonds significantly affect the chemical properties of a molecule, so an expressive model ought to exploit both node (atom) and edge (bond) information simultaneously. Inspired by this observation, we explore the multi-view modeling with GNN (MVGNN) to form a novel paralleled framework, which considers both atoms and bonds equally important when learning molecular representations. In specific, one view is atom-central and the other view is bond-central, then the two views are circulated via specifically designed components to enable more accurate predictions. To further enhance the expressive power of MVGNN, we propose a cross-dependent message-passing scheme to enhance information communication of different views. The overall framework is termed as CD-MVGNN.

   We theoretically justify the expressiveness of the proposed model in terms of distinguishing non-isomorphism graphs. Extensive experiments demonstrate that CD-MVGNN achieves remarkably superior performance over the state-of-the-art models on various challenging benchmarks. Meanwhile, visualization results of the node importance are consistent with prior knowledge, which confirms the interpretability power of CD-MVGNN.

   The code and data underlying this work are available in GitHub at https://github.com/uta-smile/CD-MVGNN.

   Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

    

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4. SkipGNN: predicting molecular interactions with skip-graph networks

   https://doi.org/10.1038/s41598-020-77766-9  

   Huang, Kexin ; Xiao, Cao ; Glass, Lucas M. ; Zitnik, Marinka ; Sun, Jimeng ( December 2020 , Scientific Reports)

   null (Ed.)

   Abstract Molecular interaction networks are powerful resources for molecular discovery. They are increasingly used with machine learning methods to predict biologically meaningful interactions. While deep learning on graphs has dramatically advanced the prediction prowess, current graph neural network (GNN) methods are mainly optimized for prediction on the basis of direct similarity between interacting nodes. In biological networks, however, similarity between nodes that do not directly interact has proved incredibly useful in the last decade across a variety of interaction networks. Here, we present SkipGNN, a graph neural network approach for the prediction of molecular interactions. SkipGNN predicts molecular interactions by not only aggregating information from direct interactions but also from second-order interactions, which we call skip similarity. In contrast to existing GNNs, SkipGNN receives neural messages from two-hop neighbors as well as immediate neighbors in the interaction network and non-linearly transforms the messages to obtain useful information for prediction. To inject skip similarity into a GNN, we construct a modified version of the original network, called the skip graph. We then develop an iterative fusion scheme that optimizes a GNN using both the skip graph and the original graph. Experiments on four interaction networks, including drug–drug, drug–target, protein–protein, and gene–disease interactions, show that SkipGNN achieves superior and robust performance. Furthermore, we show that unlike popular GNNs, SkipGNN learns biologically meaningful embeddings and performs especially well on noisy, incomplete interaction networks. 

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5. Electronic, redox, and optical property prediction of organic π-conjugated molecules through a hierarchy of machine learning approaches

   https://doi.org/10.1039/D2SC04676H  

   Bhat, Vinayak ; Sornberger, Parker ; Pokuri, Balaji Sesha ; Duke, Rebekah ; Ganapathysubramanian, Baskar ; Risko, Chad ( December 2022 , Chemical Science)

   Accelerating the development of π-conjugated molecules for applications such as energy generation and storage, catalysis, sensing, pharmaceuticals, and (semi)conducting technologies requires rapid and accurate evaluation of the electronic, redox, or optical properties. While high-throughput computational screening has proven to be a tremendous aid in this regard, machine learning (ML) and other data-driven methods can further enable orders of magnitude reduction in time while at the same time providing dramatic increases in the chemical space that is explored. However, the lack of benchmark datasets containing the electronic, redox, and optical properties that characterize the diverse, known chemical space of organic π-conjugated molecules limits ML model development. Here, we present a curated dataset containing 25k molecules with density functional theory (DFT) and time-dependent DFT (TDDFT) evaluated properties that include frontier molecular orbitals, ionization energies, relaxation energies, and low-lying optical excitation energies. Using the dataset, we train a hierarchy of ML models, ranging from classical models such as ridge regression to sophisticated graph neural networks, with molecular SMILES representation as input. We observe that graph neural networks augmented with contextual information allow for significantly better predictions across a wide array of properties. Our best-performing models also provide an uncertainty quantification for the predictions. To democratize access to the data and trained models, an interactive web platform has been developed and deployed. 

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