Predicting protein stability changes under multiple amino acid substitutions using equivariant graph neural networks
This addresses the problem of in-silico protein redesign for researchers, but it appears incremental as it builds on existing state-of-the-art models.
The paper tackled predicting protein stability changes under multiple amino acid substitutions by improving deep learning models using E(3)-equivariant graph neural networks, achieving promising results on a new large-scale dataset.
The accurate prediction of changes in protein stability under multiple amino acid substitutions is essential for realising true in-silico protein re-design. To this purpose, we propose improvements to state-of-the-art Deep learning (DL) protein stability prediction models, enabling first-of-a-kind predictions for variable numbers of amino acid substitutions, on structural representations, by decoupling the atomic and residue scales of protein representations. This was achieved using E(3)-equivariant graph neural networks (EGNNs) for both atomic environment (AE) embedding and residue-level scoring tasks. Our AE embedder was used to featurise a residue-level graph, then trained to score mutant stability ($ΔΔG$). To achieve effective training of this predictive EGNN we have leveraged the unprecedented scale of a new high-throughput protein stability experimental data-set, Mega-scale. Finally, we demonstrate the immediately promising results of this procedure, discuss the current shortcomings, and highlight potential future strategies.