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Generic protein–ligand interaction scoring by integrating physical prior knowledge and data augmentation modelling

A preprint version of the article is available at bioRxiv.

Abstract

Developing robust methods for evaluating protein–ligand interactions has been a long-standing problem. Data-driven methods may memorize ligand and protein training data rather than learning protein–ligand interactions. Here we show a scoring approach called EquiScore, which utilizes a heterogeneous graph neural network to integrate physical prior knowledge and characterize protein–ligand interactions in equivariant geometric space. EquiScore is trained based on a new dataset constructed with multiple data augmentation strategies and a stringent redundancy-removal scheme. On two large external test sets, EquiScore consistently achieved top-ranking performance compared to 21 other methods. When EquiScore is used alongside different docking methods, it can effectively enhance the screening ability of these docking methods. EquiScore also showed good performance on the activity-ranking task of a series of structural analogues, indicating its potential to guide lead compound optimization. Finally, we investigated different levels of interpretability of EquiScore, which may provide more insights into structure-based drug design.

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Fig. 1: The pipeline of building the PDBscreen dataset.
Fig. 2: The overall architecture of EquiScore.
Fig. 3: Evaluation of 22 scoring methods on DEKOIS2.0.
Fig. 4: Evaluation of 22 scoring methods on DUD-E in terms of AUROC, BEDROC and EF.
Fig. 5: Performance comparison of EquiScore for rescoring the docking poses generated by different docking methods on DEKOIS2.0.
Fig. 6: Interpretation of EquiScore by visualizing attention distribution.

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Data availability

The PDBscreen dataset supporting this study’s findings is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8049380 (ref. 67). The test dataset supporting this study’s findings is available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.8047224 (ref. 68). Original data and supplementary information supporting this study’s findings are available via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10812637 (ref. 69). Source data are provided with this paper.

Code availability

The code used to generate the results shown in this study is available under an MIT License via GitHub at https://github.com/CAODH/EquiScore (ref. 70) and via Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.10812534 (ref. 71).

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Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge financial support from the National Natural Science Foundation of China (T2225002 and 82273855 to M.Z., 82204278 to X. Li), the National Key Research and Development Program of China (2023YFC2305904 to M.Z.), the Shanghai Municipal Science and Technology Major Project (to M.Z.), the SIMM-SHUTCM Traditional Chinese Medicine Innovation Joint Research Program (E2G805H to M.Z.) and the Youth Innovation Promotion Association CAS (2023296 to S.Z.). We also acknowledge the Shanghai Supercomputer Center for providing computing resources.

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M.Z. designed the study. D.C. developed the method and implemented the code. G.C. and D.C. collected and processed training data. D.C., G.C., J.J. and J.Y. benchmarked the methods. All authors contributed to the analysis of the results. D.C., G.C. and M.Z. wrote the paper. All authors read and approved the paper.

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Correspondence to Mingyue Zheng.

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Extended data

Extended Data Fig. 1 Ablation results for VS and analogs ranking tasks.

a: VS performance is measured by 1.0% EF on DEKOIS2.0 (number of data points n = 81). The white points in the violin plots represent the means for each bin. b: Analogs ranking is measured by Spearman’s coefficient on LeadOpt (number of data points n = 8). The white points represent the average of coefficient values weighted by the number of ligands in each group (details on sample size for each group in Table 1).

Source data

Extended Data Table 1 Statistics of PDBscreen
Extended Data Table 2 Spearman Correlation Coefficients on LeadOpt
Extended Data Table 3 Statistics of PDBbind2020, CASF-2016, DUD-E, and DEKOIS2.0
Extended Data Table 4 List of Node and Edge Features

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Source Data Extended Data Table 2 (download XLSX )

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Cao, D., Chen, G., Jiang, J. et al. Generic protein–ligand interaction scoring by integrating physical prior knowledge and data augmentation modelling. Nat Mach Intell 6, 688–700 (2024). https://doi.org/10.1038/s42256-024-00849-z

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