Enhancing Evolutionary Couplings with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks

While genes are defined by sequence, in biological systems a protein's function is largely determined by its three-dimensional structure. Evolutionary information embedded within multiple sequence alignments provides a rich source of data for inferring structural constraints on macromolecules. Still, many proteins of interest lack sufficient numbers of related sequences, leading to noisy, error-prone residue-residue contact predictions. Here we introduce DeepContact, a convolutional neural network (CNN)-based approach that discovers co-evolutionary motifs and leverages these patterns to enable accurate inference of contact probabilities, particularly when few related sequences are available. DeepContact significantly improves performance over previous methods, including in the CASP12 blind contact prediction task where we achieved top performance with another CNN-based approach. Moreover, our tool converts hard-to-interpret coupling scores into probabilities, moving the field toward a consistent metric to assess contact prediction across diverse proteins. Through substantially improving the precision-recall behavior of contact prediction, DeepContact suggests we are near a paradigm shift in template-free modeling for protein structure prediction.