Related Experiment Video
Updated: Oct 24, 2025

Author Spotlight: A Computational Approach to Decipher Amino Acid Preferences in Multispecific Protein-Protein Interactions
Published on: January 26, 2024
PASSer: Prediction of Allosteric Sites Server
Abstract:
Allostery is considered important in regulating protein's activity. Drug development depends on the understanding of allosteric mechanisms, especially the identification of allosteric sites, which is a prerequisite in drug discovery and design. Many computational methods have been developed for allosteric site prediction using pocket features and protein dynamics. Here, we present an ensemble learning method, consisting of eXtreme gradient boosting (XGBoost) and graph convolutional neural network (GCNN), to predict allosteric sites. Our model can learn physical properties and topology without any prior information, and shows good performance under multiple indicators. Prediction results showed that 84.9% of allosteric pockets in the test set appeared in the top 3 positions. The PASSer: Protein Allosteric Sites Server (https://passer.smu.edu), along with a command line interface (CLI, https://github.com/smutaogroup/passerCLI) provide insights for further analysis in drug discovery.
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