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Abstract Motivation Deep learning has revolutionized protein tertiary structure prediction recently. The cutting-edge deep learning methods such as AlphaFold can predict high-accuracy tertiary structures for most individual protein chains. However, the accuracy of predicting quaternary structures of protein complexes consisting of multiple chains is still relatively low due to lack of advanced deep learning methods in the field. Because interchain residue–residue contacts can be used as distance restraints to guide quaternary structure modeling, here we develop a deep dilated convolutional residual network method (DRCon) to predict interchain residue–residue contacts in homodimers from residue–residue co-evolutionary signals derived from multiple sequence alignments of monomers, intrachain residue–residue contacts of monomers extracted from true/predicted tertiary structures or predicted by deep learning, and other sequence and structural features.
Results Tested on three homodimer test datasets (Homo_std dataset, DeepHomo dataset and CASP-CAPRI dataset), the precision of DRCon for top L/5 interchain contact predictions (L: length of monomer in a homodimer) is 43.46%, 47.10% and 33.50% respectively at 6 Å contact threshold, which is substantially better than DeepHomo and DNCON2_inter and similar to Glinter. Moreover, our experiments demonstrate that using predicted tertiary structure or intrachain contacts of monomers in the unbound state as input, DRCon still performs well, even though its accuracy is lower than using true tertiary structures in the bound state are used as input. Finally, our case study shows that good interchain contact predictions can be used to build high-accuracy quaternary structure models of homodimers.
Availability and implementation The source code of DRCon is available at https://github.com/jianlin-cheng/DRCon. The datasets are available at https://zenodo.org/record/5998532#.YgF70vXMKsB.
Supplementary information Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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Proteins interact to form complexes. Predicting the quaternary structure of protein complexes is useful for protein function analysis, protein engineering, and drug design. However, few user-friendly tools leveraging the latest deep learning technology for inter-chain contact prediction and the distance-based modelling to predict protein quaternary structures are available. To address this gap, we develop DeepComplex, a web server for predicting structures of dimeric protein complexes. It uses deep learning to predict inter-chain contacts in a homodimer or heterodimer. The predicted contacts are then used to construct a quaternary structure of the dimer by the distance-based modelling, which can be interactively viewed and analysed. The web server is freely accessible and requires no registration. It can be easily used by providing a job name and an email address along with the tertiary structure for one chain of a homodimer or two chains of a heterodimer. The output webpage provides the multiple sequence alignment, predicted inter-chain residue-residue contact map, and predicted quaternary structure of the dimer. DeepComplex web server is freely available at http://tulip.rnet.missouri.edu/deepcomplex/web_index.htmlmore » « less
