Liangzhen Zheng

Tao Shen, Zhihang Hu, Siqi Sun et al.

Accurate prediction of RNA three-dimensional (3D) structure remains an unsolved challenge. Determining RNA 3D structures is crucial for understanding their functions and informing RNA-targeting drug development and synthetic biology design. The structural flexibility of RNA, which leads to scarcity of experimentally determined data, complicates computational prediction efforts. Here, we present RhoFold+, an RNA language model-based deep learning method that accurately predicts 3D structures of single-chain RNAs from sequences. By integrating an RNA language model pre-trained on ~23.7 million RNA sequences and leveraging techniques to address data scarcity, RhoFold+ offers a fully automated end-to-end pipeline for RNA 3D structure prediction. Retrospective evaluations on RNA-Puzzles and CASP15 natural RNA targets demonstrate RhoFold+'s superiority over existing methods, including human expert groups. Its efficacy and generalizability are further validated through cross-family and cross-type assessments, as well as time-censored benchmarks. Additionally, RhoFold+ predicts RNA secondary structures and inter-helical angles, providing empirically verifiable features that broaden its applicability to RNA structure and function studies.

Liangzhen Zheng, Haidong Lan, Tao Shen et al.

Protein structure prediction has been a grand challenge for over 50 years, owing to its broad scientific and application interests. There are two primary types of modeling algorithms, template-free modeling and template-based modeling. The latter one is suitable for easy prediction tasks and is widely adopted in computer-aided drug discoveries for drug design and screening. Although it has been several decades since its first edition, the current template-based modeling approach suffers from two critical problems: 1) there are many missing regions in the template-query sequence alignment, and 2) the accuracy of the distance pairs from different regions of the template varies, and this information is not well introduced into the modeling. To solve these two problems, we propose a structural optimization process based on template modeling, introducing two neural network models to predict the distance information of the missing regions and the accuracy of the distance pairs of different regions in the template modeling structure. The predicted distances and residue pairwise-specific deviations are incorporated into the potential energy function for structural optimization, which significantly improves the qualities of the original template modeling decoys.