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Updated: May 29, 2025

Author Spotlight: A Computational Approach to Decipher Amino Acid Preferences in Multispecific Protein-Protein Interactions
Published on: January 26, 2024
CPI-Pred: A deep learning framework for predicting functional parameters of compound-protein interactions
Zhiqing Xu1, Rana Ahmed Barghout1, Jinghao Wu1
1Department of Chemical Engineering and Applied Chemistry, University of Toronto, Toronto, ON, Canada.
Abstract:
Recent advancements in deep learning have enabled functional annotation of genome sequences, facilitating the discovery of new enzymes and metabolites. However, accurately predicting compound-protein interactions (CPI) from sequences remains challenging due to the complexity of these interactions and the sparsity and heterogeneity of available data, which constrain the generalization of patterns across their solution space. In this work, we introduce CPI-Pred, a versatile deep learning model designed to predict compound-protein interaction function. CPI-Pred integrates compound representations derived from a novel message-passing neural network and enzyme representations generated by state-of-the-art protein language models, leveraging innovative sequence pooling and cross-attention mechanisms. To train and evaluate CPI-Pred, we compiled the largest dataset of enzyme kinetic parameters to date, encompassing four key metrics: the Michaelis-Menten constant (K M), enzyme turnover number (k cat), catalytic efficiency (k cat /K M), and inhibition constant (K I). These kinetic parameters are critical for elucidating enzyme function in metabolic contexts and understanding their regulation by compounds within biological networks. We demonstrate that CPI-Pred can predict diverse types of CPI using only the amino acid sequence of enzymes and structural representations of compounds, outperforming state-of-the-art models on unseen compounds and structurally dissimilar enzymes. Over workflow provides a valuable tool for tackling a range of metabolic engineering challenges, including the designing of novel enzyme sequences and compounds, such as enzyme inhibitors. Additionally, the datasets curated in this study offer a valuable resource for the scientific community, serving as a benchmark for machine learning models focused on enzyme activity and promiscuity prediction.
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