SearcharxivSearch

arXiv · 2411.12597

GNNAS-Dock: Budget Aware Algorithm Selection with Graph Neural Networks for Molecular Docking

Abstract

Molecular docking is a major element in drug discovery and design. It enables the prediction of ligand-protein interactions by simulating the binding of small molecules to proteins. Despite the availability of numerous docking algorithms, there is no single algorithm consistently outperforms the others across a diverse set of docking scenarios. This paper introduces GNNAS-Dock, a novel Graph Neural Network (GNN)-based automated algorithm selection system for molecular docking in blind docking situations. GNNs are accommodated to process the complex structural data of both ligands and proteins. They benefit from the inherent graph-like properties to predict the performance of various docking algorithms under different conditions. The present study pursues two main objectives: 1) predict the performance of each candidate docking algorithm, in terms of Root Mean Square Deviation (RMSD), thereby identifying the most accurate method for specific scenarios; and 2) choose the best computationally efficient docking algorithm for each docking case, aiming to reduce the time required for docking while maintaining high accuracy. We validate our approach on PDBBind 2020 refined set, which contains about 5,300 pairs of protein-ligand complexes.

Explore related subjects

Keep this discovery

BibTeXRIS

Yiliang Yuan, Mustafa Misir. 2024-11-19. GNNAS-Dock: Budget Aware Algorithm Selection with Graph Neural Networks for Molecular Docking. https://arxiv.org/abs/2411.12597

Cite the original work for its findings. Save a collection to share your selection of sources.

KEEP EXPLORING

Related papers

Sequence-Informed Geometric Evaluation of RNA 3D Structures

Computational RNA structure pipelines generate many candidate conformations for the same sequence. Reliable evaluation therefore requires more than recognising plausible geometry, it requires determining whether that geometry is compatible with the sequence. We introduce SIRGE, a sequence-informed geometric evaluator that conditions structural representations on nucleotide embeddings from a pretrained RNA language model. Early results show that SIRGE outperforms established evaluators in Kendall--$\tau$ alignment, Top-1 selection, and Top-3 ranking. Controlled comparisons further show that sequence conditioning corrects errors made by an otherwise matched geometric model and improves target-level rank structure. These findings provide initial evidence that pretrained sequence representations supply ranking information that complements geometric reasoning.

q-bio.BM

PocketVE: Stable and Property-Guided Structure-Based Drug Design with Variance-Exploding Diffusion

Protein-conditioned 3D molecule generation is a central challenge in structure-based drug design, requiring a balance between pocket compatibility, molecular properties, and physical geometry. We propose \textbf{PocketVE}, a protein-pocket-conditioned variance-exploding (VE) diffusion framework that couples stable coordinate denoising with inference-time property guidance. Specifically, PocketVE combines an EDM-style training and sampling setup for 3D denoising, classifier-free guidance for multi-property steering without external property classifiers, and adaptive protein perturbation as a training-time pocket regularizer. Evaluated on CrossDocked2020 under the GenBench3D protocol, PocketVE improves Valid$_{3\text{D}}$ from 58.6 to 80.6 and reduces strain energy from 457.4 to 127.9 relative to its TAGMol architectural baseline, while retaining competitive docking and molecular-property scores under moderate guidance. A guidance-scale study shows that moderate guidance gives a favorable balance between target-related objectives and geometric quality, whereas stronger guidance can degrade geometry and distributional fidelity. Pocket-permutation and PoseCheck diagnostics further support pocket-specific spatial compatibility with reduced steric conflicts. Overall, the results suggest that geometric stability and inference-time property guidance should be considered as coupled design objectives.

q-bio.BM

Predicting directional flexibility in proteins

Predicting protein dynamics is a long-standing problem in computational structural biology. Often, protein function critically depends on local directed motions, such as hinge movements, catalytic loop rearrangements and domain reorientations, which can be characterized by directional flexibility and correlated structural motions of the protein backbone. While Molecular Dynamics (MD) simulations provide an established but often prohibitively expensive approach, recent deep generative models aim to reduce this cost by directly predicting conformational ensembles, emulating MD. However, due to their large size and the need to generate several states until the derived dynamical properties converge, these models remain expensive. In this work, we propose BackFlip-2: a fast SE(3)-equivariant graph neural network trained to directly predict dynamical descriptors, such as directional backbone flexibility and pairwise dynamic correlations, from an equilibrium structure. In a series of experiments, we show that our model matches the accuracy of substantially larger ensemble generation models while being orders of magnitude faster, and demonstrate that the proposed equivariant architecture is especially well-suited for capturing anisotropic motions in proteins. BackFlip-2 model weights, training and inference code are available at https://github.com/graeter-group/backflip.

q-bio.BM