This paper presents a new deep learning method that predicts contacts by integrating both evolutionary coupling (EC) and sequence conservation information through an ultra-deep neural network formed by two deep residual neural networks. The first residual network conducts a series of 1-dimensional convolutional transformation of sequential features; the second residual network conducts a series of 2-dimensional convolutional transformation of pairwise information including output of the first residual network, EC information and pairwise potential. By using very deep residual networks, we can accurately model contact occurrence patterns and complex sequence-structure relationship and thus, obtain higher-quality contact prediction regardless of how many sequence homologs are available for proteins in question.
Our method greatly outperforms existing methods and leads to much more accurate contact-assisted folding. Tested on 105 CASP11 targets, 76 past CAMEO hard targets, and 398 membrane proteins, the average top L long-range prediction accuracy obtained by our method, one representative EC method CCMpred and the CASP11 winner MetaPSICOV is 0.47, 0.21 and 0.30, respectively; the average top L/10 long-range accuracy of our method, CCMpred and MetaPSICOV is 0.77, 0.47 and 0.59, respectively. Ab initio folding using our predicted contacts as restraints but without any force fields can yield correct folds (i.e., TMscore>0.6) for 203 of the 579 test proteins, while that using MetaPSICOV- and CCMpred-predicted contacts can do so for only 79 and 62 of them, respectively. Our contact-assisted models also have much better quality than template-based models especially for membrane proteins. The 3D models built from our contact prediction have TMscore>0.5 for 208 of the 398 membrane proteins, while those from homology modeling have TMscore>0.5 for only 10 of them. Further, even if trained mostly by soluble proteins, our deep learning method works very well on membrane proteins. In the recent blind CAMEO benchmark, our fully-automated web server implementing this method successfully folded 6 targets with a new fold and only 0.3L-2.3L effective sequence homologs, including one β protein of 182 residues, one α+β protein of 125 residues, one α protein of 140 residues, one α protein of 217 residues, one α/β of 260 residues and one α protein of 462 residues. Our method also achieved the highest F1 score on free-modeling targets in the latest CASP (Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction), although it was not fully implemented back then.
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Protein contact prediction and contact-assisted folding has made good progress due to direct evolutionary coupling analysis (DCA). However, DCA is effective on only some proteins with a very large number of sequence homologs. To further improve contact prediction, we borrow ideas from deep learning, which has recently revolutionized object recognition, speech recognition and the GO game. Our deep learning method can model complex sequence-structure relationship and high-order correlation (i.e., contact occurrence patterns) and thus, improve contact prediction accuracy greatly. Our test results show that our method greatly outperforms the state-of-the-art methods regardless how many sequence homologs are available for a protein in question. Ab initio folding guided by our predicted contacts may fold many more test proteins than the other contact predictors. Our contact-assisted 3D models also have much better quality than homology models built from the training proteins, especially for membrane proteins. One interesting finding is that even trained mostly with soluble proteins, our method performs very well on membrane proteins. Recent blind CAMEO test confirms that our method can fold large proteins with a new fold and only a small number of sequence homologs.
De novo protein structure prediction from sequence alone is one of most challenging problems in computational biology. Recent progress has indicated that some correctly-predicted long-range contacts may allow accurate topology-level structure modeling [1] and that direct evolutionary coupling analysis (DCA) of multiple sequence alignment (MSA) may reveal some long-range native contacts for proteins and protein-protein interactions with a large number of sequence homologs [2, 3]. Therefore, contact prediction and contact-assisted protein folding has recently gained much attention in the community. However, for many proteins especially those without many sequence homologs, the predicted contacts by the state-of-the-art predictors such as CCMpred [4], PSICOV [5], Evfold [6], plmDCA[7], Gremlin[8], MetaPSICOV [9] and CoinDCA [10] are still of low quality and insufficient for accurate contact-assisted protein folding [11, 12]. This motivates us to develop a better contact prediction method, especially for proteins without a large number of sequence homologs. In this paper we define that two residues form a contact if they are spatially proximal in the native structure, i.e., the Euclidean distance of their Cβ atoms less than 8Å [13].
To further improve supervised learning methods for contact prediction, we borrow ideas from very recent breakthrough in computer vision. In particular, we have greatly improved contact prediction by developing a brand-new deep learning model called residual neural network [20] for contact prediction. Deep learning is a powerful machine learning technique that has revolutionized image classification [21, 22] and speech recognition [23]. In 2015, ultra-deep residual neural networks [24] demonstrated superior performance in several computer vision challenges (similar to CASP) such as image classification and object recognition [25]. If we treat a protein contact map as an image, then protein contact prediction is kind of similar to (but not exactly same as) pixel-level image labeling, so some techniques effective for image labeling may also work for contact prediction. However, there are some important differences between image labeling and contact prediction. First, in computer vision community, image-level labeling (i.e., classification of a single image) has been extensively studied, but there are much fewer studies on pixel-level image labeling (i.e., classification of an individual pixel). Second, in many image classification scenarios, image size is resized to a fixed value, but we cannot resize a contact map since we need to do prediction for every residue pair (equivalent to an image pixel). Third, contact prediction has much more complex input features (including both sequential and pairwise features) than image labeling. Fourth, the ratio of contacts in a protein is very small (
Fig 1 illustrates our deep neural network model for contact prediction [29]. Different from previous supervised learning approaches[9, 13] for contact prediction that employ only a small number of hidden layers (i.e., a shallow architecture), our deep neural network employs dozens of hidden layers. By using a very deep architecture, our model can automatically learn the complex relationship between sequence information and contacts and also model the interdependency among contacts and thus, improve contact prediction [17]. Our model consists of two major modules, each being a residual neural network. The first module conducts a series of 1-dimensional (1D) convolutional transformations of sequential features (sequence profile, predicted secondary structure and solvent accessibility). The output of this 1D convolutional network is converted to a 2-dimensional (2D) matrix by outer concatenation (an operation similar to outer product) and then fed into the 2nd module together with pairwise features (i.e., co-evolution information, pairwise contact and distance potential). The 2nd module is a 2D residual network that conducts a series of 2D convolutional transformations of its input. Finally, the output of the 2D convolutional network is fed into a logistic regression, which predicts the probability of any two residues form a contact. In addition, each convolutional layer is also preceded by a simple nonlinear transformation called rectified linear unit [30]. Mathematically, the output of 1D residual network is just a 2D matrix with dimension Lm where m is the number of new features (or hidden neurons) generated by the last convolutional layer of the network. Biologically, this 1D residual network learns the sequential context of a residue. By stacking multiple convolution layers, the network can learn information in a very large sequential context. The output of a 2D convolutional layer has dimension LLn where n is the number of new features (or hidden neurons) generated by this layer for one residue pair. The 2D residual network mainly learns contact occurrence patterns or high-order residue correlation (i.e., 2D context of a residue pair). The number of hidden neurons may vary at each layer.
One of the important goals of contact prediction is to perform contact-assisted protein folding [11]. To test if our contact prediction can lead to better 3D structure modeling than the others, we build structure models for all the test proteins using the top predicted contacts as restraints of ab initio folding. For each test protein, we feed the top predicted contacts as restraints into the CNS suite [32] to generate 3D models. We measure the quality of a 3D model by a superposition-dependent score TMscore [33], which ranges from 0 to 1, with 0 indicating the worst and 1 the best, respectively. According to Xu and Zhang [34], a model with TMscore>0.5 (TMscore>0.6) is likely (highly likely) to have a correct fold. We also measure the quality of a 3D model by a superposition-independent score lDDT, which ranges from 0 to 100, with 0 indicating the worst and 100 the best, respectively.
Fig 3 shows that our predicted contacts can generate much better 3D models than CCMpred and MetaPSICOV. On average, our 3D models are better than MetaPSICOV and CCMpred by 0.12 TMscore unit and 0.15 unit, respectively. When the top 1 models are evaluated, the average TMscore obtained by CCMpred, MetaPSICOV, and our method is 0.333, 0.377, and 0.518, respectively on the CASP dataset. The average lDDT of CCMpred, MetaPSICOV and our method is 31.7, 34.1 and 41.8, respectively. On the 76 CAMEO targets, the average TMsore of CCMpred, MetaPSICOV and our method is 0.256, 0.305 and 0.407, respectively. The average lDDT of CCMpred, MetaPSICOV and our method is 31.8, 35.4 and 40.2, respectively. On the membrane protein set, the average TMscore of CCMpred, MetaPSICOV and our method is 0.354, 0.387, and 0.493, respectively. The average lDDT of CCMpred, MetaPSICOV and our method is 38.1, 40.5 and 47.8, respectively. Same trend is observed when the best of top 5 models are evaluated (S1 Fig). On the CASP set, the average TMscore of the models generated by CCMpred, MetaPSICOV, and our method is 0.352, 0.399, and 0.543, respectively. The average lDDT of CCMpred, MetaPSICOV and our method is 32.3, 34.9 and 42.4, respectively. On the 76 CAMEO proteins, the average TMscore of CCMpred, MetaPSICOV, and our method is 0.271, 0.334, and 0.431, respectively. The average lDDT of CCMpred, MetaPSICOV and our method is 32.4, 36.1 and 40.9, respectively. On the membrane protein set, the average TMscore of CCMpred, MetaPSICOV, and our method is 0.385, 0.417, and 0.516, respectively. The average lDDT of CCMpred, MetaPSICOV and our method is 38.9, 41.2 and 48.5, respectively. In particular, when the best of top 5 models are considered, our predicted contacts can result in correct folds (i.e., TMscore>0.6) for 203 of the 579 test proteins, while MetaPSICOV- and CCMpred-predicted contacts can do so for only 79 and 62 of them, respectively. 2ff7e9595c
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