ABAG-Rank: Improving Model Selection of AlphaFold Antibody-Antigen Complexes by Learning to Rank

AlphaFold has transformed structural biology with an unprecedented accuracy in modelling protein structures and their interactions with biomolecules, with AlphaFold3 (AF3) achieving state-of-the-art performance. However, AF3 and other methods often struggle to accurately predict the structure of protein complexes that lack strong co-evolutionary information, such as antibody-antigen (Ab-Ag) complexes. One of the fundamental issues is that AF3 often generates accurate predictions, but fails to reliably distinguish them from the much larger set of incorrect ones.

To address this, we propose ABAG-Rank, a deep neural network that provides an efficient and robust solution for model selection of Ab-Ag interactions from a pool of structural ensembles predicted with AlphaFold. Built on the permutation-invariant DeepSets architecture, ABAG-Rank can process variable-sized ensembles of structural decoys and is directly applicable to prediction settings in which the number of candidates may vary. We train a model on a redundancy-reduced set of all known antibody-antigen complexes and find that simple geometric descriptors, along with confidence scores from AlphaFold, provide rich information about interface quality without requiring intensive physics-based calculations. Our experiments demonstrate that ABAG-Rank significantly outperforms AF3 internal scoring and the ranking performance of existing deep learning baselines.

Source code can be found at: https://github.com/tadteo/ABAG-Rank or on Zenodo at https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.21132090.

Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.