Zhiwei Nie

Mingqing Wang, Zhiwei Nie, Athanasios V. Vasilakos et al.

Proteins encode diverse functions within complex three-dimensional structures, yet most deep learning representations remain highly entangled, obscuring the biophysical signals that underlie function. Here we introduce ProtDiS, a knowledge-guided framework that decomposes pretrained protein micro-environment embeddings into biologically grounded and task-relevant dimensions. Inspired by the information bottleneck principle, ProtDiS learns representations that balance informativeness and compression, yielding structural features that are more specific, independent, and information-efficient, and achieving consistent improvements across twelve downstream tasks, with the largest gains under structure-based splits. Protein- and residue-level analyses further show that ProtDiS differentiates proteins with similar folds but divergent functions and captures fine-grained biophysical signals critical. These findings suggest that knowledge-guided decomposition provides a general and interpretable approach for structuring latent spaces in protein structural modeling. The source code and implementation details are publicly available at https://github.com/AI-HPC-Research-Team/ProtDiS.

Zishan Shu, Yufan Deng, Hongyu Zhang et al.

Activity cliff prediction is a critical task in drug discovery and material design. Existing computational methods are limited to handling single binding targets, which restricts the applicability of these prediction models. In this paper, we present the Multi-Grained Target Perception network (MTPNet) to incorporate the prior knowledge of interactions between the molecules and their target proteins. Specifically, MTPNet is a unified framework for activity cliff prediction, which consists of two components: Macro-level Target Semantic (MTS) guidance and Micro-level Pocket Semantic (MPS) guidance. By this way, MTPNet dynamically optimizes molecular representations through multi-grained protein semantic conditions. To our knowledge, it is the first time to employ the receptor proteins as guiding information to effectively capture critical interaction details. Extensive experiments on 30 representative activity cliff datasets demonstrate that MTPNet significantly outperforms previous approaches, achieving an average RMSE improvement of 18.95% on top of several mainstream GNN architectures. Overall, MTPNet internalizes interaction patterns through conditional deep learning to achieve unified predictions of activity cliffs, helping to accelerate compound optimization and design. Codes are available at: https://github.com/ZishanShu/MTPNet.

Haomin Wu, Zhiwei Nie, Hongyu Zhang et al.

Accurate prediction of enzyme kinetic parameters is essential for understanding catalytic mechanisms and guiding enzyme engineering.However, existing deep learning-based enzyme-substrate interaction (ESI) predictors often exhibit performance degradation on sequence-divergent, out-of-distribution (OOD) cases, limiting robustness under biologically relevant perturbations.We propose O$^2$DENet, a lightweight, plug-and-play module that enhances OOD generalization via biologically and chemically informed perturbation augmentation and invariant representation learning.O$^2$DENet introduces enzyme-substrate perturbations and enforces consistency between original and augmented enzyme-substrate-pair representations to encourage invariance to distributional shifts.When integrated with representative ESI models, O$^2$DENet consistently improves predictive performance for both $k_{cat}$ and $K_m$ across stringent sequence-identity-based OOD benchmarks, achieving state-of-the-art results among the evaluated methods in terms of accuracy and robustness metrics.Overall, O$^2$DENet provides a general and effective strategy to enhance the stability and deployability of data-driven enzyme kinetics predictors for real-world enzyme engineering applications.

Zhiwei Nie, Hongyu Zhang, Hao Jiang et al.

Understanding and modeling enzyme-substrate interactions is crucial for catalytic mechanism research, enzyme engineering, and metabolic engineering. Although a large number of predictive methods have emerged, they do not incorporate prior knowledge of enzyme catalysis to rationally modulate general protein-molecule features that are misaligned with catalytic patterns. To address this issue, we introduce a two-stage progressive framework, OmniESI, for enzyme-substrate interaction prediction through conditional deep learning. By decomposing the modeling of enzyme-substrate interactions into a two-stage progressive process, OmniESI incorporates two conditional networks that respectively emphasize enzymatic reaction specificity and crucial catalysis-related interactions, facilitating a gradual feature modulation in the latent space from general protein-molecule domain to catalysis-aware domain. On top of this unified architecture, OmniESI can adapt to a variety of downstream tasks, including enzyme kinetic parameter prediction, enzyme-substrate pairing prediction, enzyme mutational effect prediction, and enzymatic active site annotation. Under the multi-perspective performance evaluation of in-distribution and out-of-distribution settings, OmniESI consistently delivered superior performance than state-of-the-art specialized methods across seven benchmarks. More importantly, the proposed conditional networks were shown to internalize the fundamental patterns of catalytic efficiency while significantly improving prediction performance, with only negligible parameter increases (0.16%), as demonstrated by ablation studies on key components. Overall, OmniESI represents a unified predictive approach for enzyme-substrate interactions, providing an effective tool for catalytic mechanism cracking and enzyme engineering with strong generalization and broad applicability.