A Web-Based Protocol for Interprotein Contact Prediction by Deep Learning.

Identifying residue-residue contacts in protein-protein interactions or complex is crucial for understanding protein and cell functions. DCA (direct-coupling analysis) methods shed some light on this, but they need many sequence homologs to yield accurate prediction. Inspired by the success of our deep-learning method for intraprotein contact prediction, we have developed RaptorX-ComplexContact, a web server for interprotein residue-residue contact prediction. Given a pair of interacting protein sequences, RaptorX-ComplexContact first searches for their sequence homologs and builds two paired multiple sequence alignments (MSA) based on genomic distance and phylogeny information, respectively. Then, RaptorX-ComplexContact uses two deep convolutional residual neural networks (ResNet) to predict interprotein contacts from sequential features and coevolution information of paired MSAs. RaptorX-ComplexContact shall be useful for protein docking, protein-protein interaction prediction, and protein interaction network construction.