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Abstract Substantial progresses in protein structure prediction have been made by utilizing deep‐learning and residue‐residue distance prediction since CASP13. Inspired by the advances, we improve our CASP14 MULTICOM protein structure prediction system by incorporating three new components: (a) a new deep learning‐based protein inter‐residue distance predictor to improve template‐free (ab initio) tertiary structure prediction, (b) an enhanced template‐based tertiary structure prediction method, and (c) distance‐based model quality assessment methods empowered by deep learning. In the 2020 CASP14 experiment, MULTICOM predictor was ranked seventh out of 146 predictors in tertiary structure prediction and ranked third out of 136 predictors in inter‐domain structure prediction. The results demonstrate that the template‐free modeling based on deep learning and residue‐residue distance prediction can predict the correct topology for almost all template‐based modeling targets and a majority of hard targets (template‐free targets or targets whose templates cannot be recognized), which is a significant improvement over the CASP13 MULTICOM predictor. Moreover, the template‐free modeling performs better than the template‐based modeling on not only hard targets but also the targets that have homologous templates. The performance of the template‐free modeling largely depends on the accuracy of distance prediction closely related to the quality of multiple sequence alignments. The structural model quality assessment works well on targets for which enough good models can be predicted, but it may perform poorly when only a few good models are predicted for a hard target and the distribution of model quality scores is highly skewed. MULTICOM is available athttps://github.com/jianlin-cheng/MULTICOM_Human_CASP14/tree/CASP14_DeepRank3andhttps://github.com/multicom-toolbox/multicom/tree/multicom_v2.0.
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This content will become publicly available on February 1, 2026
DeepPhoPred : Accurate Deep Learning Model to Predict Microbial Phosphorylation
ABSTRACT Phosphorylation is a substantial posttranslational modification of proteins that refers to adding a phosphate group to the amino acid side chain after translation process in the ribosome. It is vital to coordinate cellular functions, such as regulating metabolism, proliferation, apoptosis, subcellular trafficking, and other crucial physiological processes. Phosphorylation prediction in a microbial organism can assist in understanding pathogenesis and host–pathogen interaction, drug and antibody design, and antimicrobial agent development. Experimental methods for predicting phosphorylation sites are costly, slow, and tedious. Hence low‐cost and high‐speed computational approaches are highly desirable. This paper presents a new deep learning tool called DeepPhoPred for predicting microbial phospho‐serine (pS), phospho‐threonine (pT), and phospho‐tyrosine (pY) sites. DeepPhoPred incorporates a two‐headed convolutional neural network architecture with the squeeze and excitation blocks followed by fully connected layers that jointly learn significant features from the peptide's structural and evolutionary information to predict phosphorylation sites. Our empirical results demonstrate that DeepPhoPred significantly outperforms the existing microbial phosphorylation site predictors with its highly efficient deep‐learning architecture. DeepPhoPred as a standalone predictor, all its source codes, and our employed datasets are publicly available athttps://github.com/faisalahm3d/DeepPhoPred.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2152059
- PAR ID:
- 10616040
- Publisher / Repository:
- Wiley
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics
- Volume:
- 93
- Issue:
- 2
- ISSN:
- 0887-3585
- Page Range / eLocation ID:
- 465 to 481
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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