Hashing for Protein Structure Similarity Search
This addresses the challenge of large-scale PSSS for applications like drug design and protein function prediction, offering a more efficient solution compared to existing alignment-free methods.
The paper tackles the problem of protein structure similarity search (PSSS) by proposing POSH, a method that learns binary vector representations to reduce time and memory costs while achieving state-of-the-art accuracy, with results showing over six times memory saving and over four times speed improvement compared to other methods.
Protein structure similarity search (PSSS), which tries to search proteins with similar structures, plays a crucial role across diverse domains from drug design to protein function prediction and molecular evolution. Traditional alignment-based PSSS methods, which directly calculate alignment on the protein structures, are highly time-consuming with high memory cost. Recently, alignment-free methods, which represent protein structures as fixed-length real-valued vectors, are proposed for PSSS. Although these methods have lower time and memory cost than alignment-based methods, their time and memory cost is still too high for large-scale PSSS, and their accuracy is unsatisfactory. In this paper, we propose a novel method, called $\underline{\text{p}}$r$\underline{\text{o}}$tein $\underline{\text{s}}$tructure $\underline{\text{h}}$ashing (POSH), for PSSS. POSH learns a binary vector representation for each protein structure, which can dramatically reduce the time and memory cost for PSSS compared with real-valued vector representation based methods. Furthermore, in POSH we also propose expressive hand-crafted features and a structure encoder to well model both node and edge interactions in proteins. Experimental results on real datasets show that POSH can outperform other methods to achieve state-of-the-art accuracy. Furthermore, POSH achieves a memory saving of more than six times and speed improvement of more than four times, compared with other methods.