Improving the topology prediction of α-helical transmembrane proteins with deep transfer learning

Transmembrane proteins (TMPs) are essential for cell recognition and communication, and they serve as important drug targets in humans. Transmembrane proteins' 3D structures are critical for determining their functions and drug design but are hard to determine even by experimental methods. Although some computational methods have been developed to predict transmembrane helices (TMHs) and orientation, there is still room for improvement. Considering that the pre-trained language model can make full use of massive unlabeled protein sequences to obtain latent feature representation for TMPs and reduce the dependence on evolutionary information, we proposed DeepTMpred, which used pre-trained self-supervised language models called ESM, convolutional neural networks, attentive neural network and conditional random fields for alpha-TMP topology prediction. Compared with the current state-of-the-art tools on a non-redundant dataset of TMPs, DeepTMpred demonstrated superior predictive performance in most evaluation metrics, especially at the TMH level. Furthermore, DeepTMpred could also obtain reliable prediction results for TMPs without much evolutionary feature in a few seconds. A tutorial on how to use DeepTMpred can be found in the colab notebook (https://colab.research.google.com/github/ISYSLAB-HUST/DeepTMpred/blob/master/notebook/test.ipynb).