Goto

Collaborating Authors

 residue


Towards Multiscale Graph-based Protein Learning with Geometric Secondary Structural Motifs

Neural Information Processing Systems

Graph neural networks (GNNs) have emerged as powerful tools for learning protein structures by capturing spatial relationships at the residue level. However, existing GNN-based methods often face challenges in learning multiscale representations and modeling long-range dependencies efficiently. In this work, we propose an efficient multiscale graph-based learning framework tailored to proteins. Our proposed framework contains two crucial components: (1) It constructs a hierarchical graph representation comprising a collection of fine-grained subgraphs, each corresponding to a secondary structure motif (e.g., ฮฑ-helices, ฮฒ-strands, loops), and a single coarse-grained graph that connects these motifs based on their spatial arrangement and relative orientation.


UniSite: The First Cross-Structure Dataset and Learning Framework for End-to-End Ligand Binding Site Detection

Neural Information Processing Systems

The detection of ligand binding sites for proteins is a fundamental step in StructureBased Drug Design. Despite notable advances in recent years, existing methods, datasets, and evaluation metrics are confronted with several key challenges: (1) current datasets and methods are centered on individual protein-ligand complexes and neglect that diverse binding sites may exist across multiple complexes of the same protein, introducing significant statistical bias; (2) ligand binding site detection is typically modeled as a discontinuous workflow, employing binary segmentation and subsequent clustering algorithms; (3) traditional evaluation metrics do not adequately reflect the actual performance of different binding site prediction methods. To address these issues, we first introduce UniSite-DS, the first UniProt (Unique Protein)-centric ligand binding site dataset, which contains 4.81 times more multi-site data and 2.08 times more overall data compared to the previously most widely used datasets. We then propose UniSite, the first end-to-end ligand binding site detection framework supervised by set prediction loss with bijective matching. In addition, we introduce Average Precision based on Intersection over Union (IoU) as a more accurate evaluation metric for ligand binding site prediction. Extensive experiments on UniSite-DS and several representative benchmark datasets demonstrate that IoU-based Average Precision provides a more accurate reflection of prediction quality, and that UniSite outperforms current state-of-theart methods in ligand binding site detection.



Understanding protein function with a multimodal retrieval-augmented foundation model

Neural Information Processing Systems

Protein language models (PLMs) learn probability distributions over natural protein sequences. By learning from hundreds of millions of natural protein sequences, protein understanding and design capabilities emerge. Recent works have shown that scaling these models improves structure prediction, but does not seem to improve mutation understanding and representation quality for protein function prediction. We introduce PoET-2, a multimodal, retrieval-augmented protein foundation model that incorporates in-context learning of family-specific evolutionary constraints with optional structure conditioning to learn generative distributions over protein sequences. PoET-2 uses a hierarchical transformer encoder that is equivariant to sequence context ordering and a dual decoder architecture with both causal and masked language modeling objectives, allowing PoET-2 to operate in both fully generative and bidirectional representation learning modes. PoET-2 achieves stateof-the-art performance on zero-shot variant effect prediction, excelling at scoring variants with multiple mutations and challenging indel mutations. In supervised settings, PoET-2 embeddings outperform previous methods for learning sequencefunction relationships, especially with small datasets. This work highlights the benefits of combining retrieval augmentation with multimodal, family-centric modeling for advancing protein foundation models. 1



CPSea: Large-scale cyclic peptide-protein complex dataset for machinelearning in cyclic peptide design

Neural Information Processing Systems

Cyclic peptides exhibit better binding affinity and proteolytic stability compared to their linear counterparts. However, the development of cyclic peptide design models is hindered by the scarcity of data. To address this, we introduce CPSea(Cyclic Peptide Sea), a dataset of 2.71 million cyclic peptide-receptor complexes, curated through systematic mining of the AlphaFold Database (AFDB). Our pipeline extracts compact domains from AFDB, identifies cyclization sites using the ฮฒ-carbon (Cฮฒ) distance thresholds, and applies multi-stage filtering to ensure structure fidelity and binding compatibility. Compared with experimental data of cyclic peptides, CPSea shows similar distributions in metrics on structure fidelity and wet-lab compatibility. To our knowledge, CPSea is the largest cyclic peptide-receptor dataset to date, enabling end-to-end model training for the first time.


Learning Topological Representations for Molecular Dynamics

arXiv.org Machine Learning

Molecular dynamics (MD) simulations generate trajectories in a high-dimensional configuration space whose analysis critically depends on molecular descriptors, typically handcrafted observables or learned kinetic embeddings. Designing descriptors that are both expressive and broadly applicable, however, remains challenging. We study persistent homology (PH) as a general-purpose representation for MD and introduce the masked Flood complex, a protein-tailored modification of a recently introduced simplicial complex construction that emphasizes inter-residue structure at low computational cost. Vectorized persistence diagrams then provide information-rich, geometry-aware summaries of protein conformations, which we evaluate on protein class prediction, frame-level observable regression, and Markov state model (MSM) estimation from learned low-dimensional coordinates in a single shared representation space. Results on the mdCATH dataset show that PH-based descriptors are competitive across tasks, with masked Flood PH yielding the most consistent overall performance. Further, when using topologically-informed MSMs as a drop-in replacement within the recent MarS-FM framework for generative modeling of protein conformations, we obtain consistently better ensemble statistics than MSMs based on physical observables. Finally, we explore the transferability of the generative model to qualitatively different, fast folding, proteins.



UniZyme: AUnified Protein Cleavage Site Predictor Enhanced with Enzyme Active-Site Knowledge

Neural Information Processing Systems

Enzyme-catalyzed protein cleavage is essential for many biological functions. Accurate prediction of cleavage sites can facilitate various applications such as drug development, enzyme design, and a deeper understanding of biological mechanisms. However, most existing models are restricted to an individual enzyme, which neglects shared knowledge of enzymes and fails to generalize to novel enzymes. Thus, we introduce a unified protein cleavage site predictor named UniZyme, which can generalize across diverse enzymes. To enhance the enzyme encoding for the protein cleavage site prediction, UniZyme employs a novel biochemically-informed model architecture along with active-site knowledge of proteolytic enzymes. Extensive experiments demonstrate that UniZyme achieves high accuracy in predicting cleavage sites across a range of proteolytic enzymes, including unseen enzymes. The code is available in https://github.com/Ao-LiChen/UniZyme.


Flash Invariant Point Attention

Neural Information Processing Systems

Invariant Point Attention (IPA) is a key algorithm for geometry-aware modeling in structural biology, central to many protein and RNA models. However, its quadratic complexity limits the input sequence length. We introduce FlashIPA, a factorized reformulation of IPA that leverages hardware-efficient FlashAttention to achieve linear scaling in GPU memory and wall-clock time with sequence length. FlashIPA matches or exceeds standard IPA performance while substantially reducing computational costs. FlashIPA extends training to previously unattainable lengths, and we demonstrate this by re-training generative models without length restrictions and generating structures of thousands of residues.