InterPepRank: Assessment of Docked Peptide Conformations by a Deep Graph Network

Peptide-protein interactions between a smaller or disordered peptide stretch and a folded receptor make up a large part of all protein-protein interactions. A common approach for modeling such interactions is to exhaustively sample the conformational space by fast-Fourier-transform docking, and then refine a top percentage of decoys. Commonly, methods capable of ranking the decoys for selection fast enough for larger scale studies rely on first-principle energy terms such as electrostatics, Van der Waals forces, or on pre-calculated statistical potentials. We present InterPepRank for peptide-protein complex scoring and ranking. InterPepRank is a machine learning-based method which encodes the structure of the complex as a graph; with physical pairwise interactions as edges and evolutionary and sequence features as nodes. The graph network is trained to predict the LRMSD of decoys by using edge-conditioned graph convolutions on a large set of peptide-protein complex decoys. InterPepRank is tested on a massive independent test set with no targets sharing CATH annotation nor 30% sequence identity with any target in training or validation data. On this set, InterPepRank has a median AUC of 0.86 for finding coarse peptide-protein complexes with LRMSD < 4Å. This is an improvement compared to other state-of-the-art ranking methods that have a median AUC between 0.65 and 0.79. When included as a selection-method for selecting decoys for refinement in a previously established peptide docking pipeline, InterPepRank improves the number of medium and high quality models produced by 80% and 40%, respectively. The InterPepRank program as well as all scripts for reproducing and retraining it are available from: .