Deep Template-based Protein Structure Prediction

Motivation TBM (template-based modeling) is a popular method for protein structure prediction. When very good templates are not available, it is challenging to identify the best templates, build accurate sequence-template alignments and construct 3D models from alignments. Results This paper presents a new method NDThreader (New Deep-learning Threader) to address the challenges of TBM. DNThreader first employs DRNF (deep convolutional residual neural fields), which is an integration of deep ResNet (convolutional residue neural networks) and CRF (conditional random fields), to align a query protein to templates without using any distance information. Then NDThreader uses ADMM (alternating direction method of multipliers) and DRNF to further improve sequence-template alignments by making use of predicted distance potential. Finally NDThreader builds 3D models from a sequence-template alignment by feeding it and sequence co-evolution information into a deep ResNet to predict inter-atom distance distribution, which is then fed into PyRosetta for 3D model construction. Our experimental results on the CASP13 and CAMEO data show that our methods outperform existing ones such as CNFpred, HHpred, DeepThreader and CEthreader. NDThreader was blindly tested in CASP14 as a part of RaptorX server, which obtained the best GDT score among all CASP14 servers on the 58 TBM targets. Availability and Implementation available as a part of web server at http://raptorx.uchicago.edu Contact [email protected] Supplementary Information Supplementary data are available online.