Relevant publications

Protein structure, both at the global and local level, dictates function. Proteins fold from chains of amino acids, forming secondary structures, α-helices and β-strands, that, at least for globular proteins, subsequently fold into a three-dimensional structure. Here, we show that a Ramachandran-type plot focusing on the two dihedral angles separated by the peptide bond, and entirely contained within an amino acid pair, defines a local structural unit. We further demonstrate the usefulness of this cross-peptide-bond Ramachandran plot by showing that it captures β-turn conformations in coil regions, that traditional Ramachandran plot outliers fall into occupied regions of our plot, and that thermophilic proteins prefer specific amino acid pair conformations. Further, we demonstrate experimentally that the effect of a point mutation on backbone conformation and protein stability depends on the amino acid pair context, i.e., the identity of the adjacent amino acid, in a manner predictable by our method.

The holy grail of materials science is de novo molecular design — i.e., the ability to engineer molecules with desired characteristics. Recently, this goal has become increasingly achievable thanks to developments such as equivariant graph neural networks that can better predict molecular properties, and to the improved performance of generation tasks, in particular of conditional generation, in text-to-image generators and large language models. Herein, we introduce GaUDI, a guided diffusion model for inverse molecular design, which combines these advances and can generate novel molecules with desired properties. GaUDI decouples the generator and the property-predicting models and can be guided using both point-wise targets and open-ended targets (e.g., minimum/maximum). We demonstrate GaUDI’s effectiveness using single- and multiple-objective tasks applied to newly-generated data sets of polycyclic aromatic systems, achieving nearly 100% validity of generated molecules. Further, for some tasks, GaUDI discovers better molecules than those present in our data set of 475k molecules.

In this work, interpretable deep learning was used to identify structure-property relationships governing the HOMO-LUMO gap and relative stability of polybenzenoid hydrocarbons (PBHs). To this end, a ring-based graph representation was used. In addition to affording reduced training times and excellent predictive ability, this representation could be combined with a subunit-based perception of PBHs, allowing chemical insights to be presented in terms of intuitive and simple structural motifs. The resulting insights agree with conventional organic chemistry knowledge and electronic structure-based analyses, and also reveal new behaviors and identify influential structural motifs. In particular, we evaluated and compared the effects of linear, angular, and branching motifs on these two molecular properties, as well as explored the role of dispersion in mitigating torsional strain inherent in non-planar PBHs. Hence, the observed regularities and the proposed analysis contribute to a deeper understanding of the behavior of PBHs and form the foundation for design strategies for new functional PBHs.

Comparison of myoglobin structures reveals that protein isolated from horse heart consistently adopts an alternate turn conformation in comparison to its homologues. Analysis of hundreds of high-resolution structures discounts crystallization conditions or the surrounding amino acid protein environment as explaining this difference, that is also not captured by the AlphaFold prediction. Rather, a water molecule is identified as stabilizing the conformation in the horse heart structure, which immediately reverts to the whale conformation in molecular dynamics simulations excluding that structural water.

Synonymous codons translate into the same amino acid. Although the identity of synonymous codons is often considered
inconsequential to the final protein structure there is mounting evidence for an association between the two. Our study
examined this association using regression and classification models, finding that codon sequences predict protein backbone dihedral angles with a lower error than amino acid sequences, and that models trained with true dihedral angles have better classification of synonymous codons given structural information than models trained with random dihedral angles. Using this classification approach, we investigated local codon-codon dependencies and tested whether synonymous codon identity can be predicted more accurately from codon context than amino acid context alone, and most specifically which codon context position carries the most predictive power.

Proteins fold from chains of amino acids, forming secondary structures, α-helices and β-strands, that, at least for globular proteins, subsequently fold into a three-dimensional structure. A large-scale analysis of high-resolution protein structures suggests that amino acid pairs constitute another layer of ordered structure, more local than these conventionally defined secondary structures. We develop a cross-peptide-bond Ramachandran plot that captures the 15 conformational preferences of the amino acid pairs and show that the effect of a particular mutation on the stability of a protein depends in a predictable manner on the adjacent amino acid context.

Synonymous codons translate into chemically identical amino acids. Once considered inconsequential to the formation of the protein product, there is now significant evidence to suggest that codon usage affects co-translational protein folding and the final structure of the expressed protein. Here we develop a method for computing and comparing codon-specific Ramachandran plots and demonstrate that the backbone dihedral angle distributions of some synonymous codons are distinguishable with statistical significance for some secondary structures. This shows that there exists a dependence between codon identity and backbone torsion of the translated amino acid. Although these findings cannot pinpoint the causal direction of this dependence, we discuss the vast biological implications should coding be shown to directly shape protein conformation and demonstrate the usefulness of this method as a tool for probing associations between codon usage and protein structure. Finally, we urge for the inclusion of exact genetic information into structural databases.