Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2020 Jul 1;36(Suppl_1):i285-i291.
doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaa455.

QDeep: distance-based protein model quality estimation by residue-level ensemble error classifications using stacked deep residual neural networks

Affiliations

QDeep: distance-based protein model quality estimation by residue-level ensemble error classifications using stacked deep residual neural networks

Md Hossain Shuvo et al. Bioinformatics. .

Abstract

Motivation: Protein model quality estimation, in many ways, informs protein structure prediction. Despite their tight coupling, existing model quality estimation methods do not leverage inter-residue distance information or the latest technological breakthrough in deep learning that has recently revolutionized protein structure prediction.

Results: We present a new distance-based single-model quality estimation method called QDeep by harnessing the power of stacked deep residual neural networks (ResNets). Our method first employs stacked deep ResNets to perform residue-level ensemble error classifications at multiple predefined error thresholds, and then combines the predictions from the individual error classifiers for estimating the quality of a protein structural model. Experimental results show that our method consistently outperforms existing state-of-the-art methods including ProQ2, ProQ3, ProQ3D, ProQ4, 3DCNN, MESHI, and VoroMQA in multiple independent test datasets across a wide-range of accuracy measures; and that predicted distance information significantly contributes to the improved performance of QDeep.

Availability and implementation: https://github.com/Bhattacharya-Lab/QDeep.

Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.

PubMed Disclaimer

Figures

Fig. 1.
Fig. 1.
Flowchart of QDeep. (A) Multiple sequence alignment generation. (B) Distance-based, sequence versus structure consistency-based and ROSETTA centroid energy terms-based features collection. (C) Architecture of stacked deep ResNet classifiers at 1, 2, 4, and 8Å error thresholds. (D) Residue-level ensemble error classifications and their combination for model quality estimation
Fig. 2.
Fig. 2.
Accuracy of the individual residue-level classifiers at 1, 2, 4, and 8Å error thresholds on the validation set of 82 CASP11 targets
Fig. 3.
Fig. 3.
The ability of single-model quality estimation methods to distinguish good and bad models in (A) CASP12 and (B) CASP13 stage 2 datasets. A cutoff of GDT-TS = 0.4 is used to separate good and bad models

References

    1. Alapati R., Bhattacharya D. (2018) clustQ: efficient protein decoy clustering using superposition-free weighted internal distance comparisons. In: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Bioinformatics, Computational Biology, and Health Informatics, BCB ’18. ACM, New York, NY, USA, pp. 307–314.
    1. Altschul S.F. et al. (1997) Gapped BLAST and PSI-BLAST: a new generation of protein database search programs. Nucleic Acids Res., 25, 3389–3402. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Benkert P. et al. (2009) Global and local model quality estimation at CASP8 using the scoring functions QMEAN and QMEANclust. Proteins, 77, 173–180. - PubMed
    1. Cao R. et al. (2015) Large-scale model quality assessment for improving protein tertiary structure prediction. Bioinformatics, 31, i116–i123. - PMC - PubMed
    1. Cao R. et al. (2016) Massive integration of diverse protein quality assessment methods to improve template based modeling in CASP11. Proteins, 84, 247–259. - PMC - PubMed

Publication types