Predicting ligand-binding sites, particularly in the absence of previously resolved homologous structures, presents a significant challenge in structural biology. Here, we leverage the internal pairwise representation of AlphaFold2 (AF2) to train a model, AF2BIND, to accurately predict small-molecule-binding residues given only a target protein. AF2BIND uses 20 "bait" amino acids to optimally extract the binding signal in the absence of a small-molecule ligand. We find that the AF2 pair representation outperforms other neural-network representations for binding-site prediction. Moreover, unique combinations of the 20 bait amino acids are correlated with chemical properties of the ligand.
For more details see preprint:
AF2BIND: Predicting ligand-binding sites using the pair representation of AlphaFold2
- Artem Gazizov, Anna Lian, Casper Alexander Goverde, Sergey Ovchinnikov, Nicholas F. Polizzi
- https://doi.org/10.1101/2023.10.15.562410
Experiments were conducted using the latest ColabDesign github commit v1.1.1, with the Alphafold's weights as of 2022-03-02