Novel hybrid protein scaffold gap filling using weighted machine learning ensemble, beam search, and mass-constrained reranking
Protein scaffold gap filling is an important computational task in protein sequence reconstruction, where missing amino acid regions must be inferred from incomplete scaffold information. This study proposes a hybrid machine learning and mass constrained reranking framework for protein scaffold gap filling under known-gap-size and known-gapmass settings. Homologous protein sequences from MabCampath, P5A proteoform, and carbonic anhydrase 2 were used to generate masked 11-mer residue-level samples and fullgap evaluation cases. The residue prediction task was formulated as a 20-class amino acid classification problem using first-, middle-, and last-position masking. Multiple classical machine learning models were trained using raw encoded, row-average, and SVD-reduced features, and the strongest models were combined through a validation-accuracy-weighted ensemble. For known-size gap reconstruction, beam search was used to generate complete missing peptide sequences from residue-level probability estimates. For known-mass reconstruction, mass-constrained homologous candidate retrieval was combined with hybrid reranking based on mass validity, homologous frequency, context support, ensemble likelihood, mass error, and length penalty. The proposed framework achieved 95.41% residue-level validation accuracy, 87.50% known-size exact-match accuracy, and 100% top-5 recovery on seven CAH2 known-mass benchmark cases. These results indicate that the proposed framework can effectively reconstruct missing protein regions by integrating local sequence learning, homologous evidence, peptide mass constraints, and biochemical validation.