Synthesis planning is the process of recursively decomposing target molecules into available precursors. Computer-aided retrosynthesis can potentially assist chemists in designing synthetic routes; however, at present, it is cumbersome and cannot provide satisfactory results. In this study, we have developed a template-free self-corrected retrosynthesis predictor (SCROP) to predict retrosynthesis using transformer neural networks. In the method, the retrosynthesis planning was converted to a machine translation problem from the products to molecular linear notations of the reactants. By coupling with a neural network-based syntax corrector, our method achieved an accuracy of 59.0% on a standard benchmark data set, which outperformed other deep learning methods by >21% and template-based methods by >6%. More importantly, our method was 1.7 times more accurate than other state-of-the-art methods for compounds not appearing in the training set.

Illuminating interactions between proteins and small drug molecules is a long-standing challenge in the field of drug discovery. Despite the importance of understanding these interactions, most previous works are limited by hand-designed scoring functions and insufficient conformation sampling. The recently-proposed graph neural network-based methods provides alternatives to predict protein-ligand complex conformation in a one-shot manner. However, these methods neglect the geometric constraints of the complex structure and weaken the role of local functional regions. As a result, they might produce unreasonable conformations for challenging targets and generalize poorly to novel proteins. In this paper, we propose Trigonometry-Aware Neural networKs for binding structure prediction, TANKBind, that builds trigonometry constraint as a vigorous inductive bias into the model and explicitly attends to all possible binding sites for each protein by segmenting the whole protein into functional blocks. We construct novel contrastive losses with local region negative sampling to jointly optimize the binding interaction and affinity. Extensive experiments show substantial performance gains in comparison to state-of-the-art physics-based and deep learning-based methods on commonly-used benchmark datasets for both binding structure and affinity predictions with variant settings. We release our code at https://github.com/luwei0917/TankBind.

Biomedical knowledge graphs (KGs), which can help with the understanding of complex biological systems and pathologies, have begun to play a critical role in medical practice and research. However, challenges remain in their embedding and use due to their complex nature and the specific demands of their construction. Existing studies often suffer from problems such as sparse and noisy datasets, insufficient modeling methods and non-uniform evaluation metrics. In this work, we established a comprehensive KG system for the biomedical field in an attempt to bridge the gap. Here, we introduced PharmKG, a multi-relational, attributed biomedical KG, composed of more than 500 000 individual interconnections between genes, drugs and diseases, with 29 relation types over a vocabulary of ~8000 disambiguated entities. Each entity in PharmKG is attached with heterogeneous, domain-specific information obtained from multi-omics data, i.e. gene expression, chemical structure and disease word embedding, while preserving the semantic and biomedical features. For baselines, we offered nine state-of-the-art KG embedding (KGE) approaches and a new biological, intuitive, graph neural network-based KGE method that uses a combination of both global network structure and heterogeneous domain features. Based on the proposed benchmark, we conducted extensive experiments to assess these KGE models using multiple evaluation metrics. Finally, we discussed our observations across various downstream biological tasks and provide insights and guidelines for how to use a KG in biomedicine. We hope that the unprecedented quality and diversity of PharmKG will lead to advances in biomedical KG construction, embedding and application.

Protein–DNA interactions play crucial roles in the biological systems, and identifying protein–DNA binding sites is the first step for mechanistic understanding of various biological activities (such as transcription and repair) and designing novel drugs. How to accurately identify DNA-binding residues from only protein sequence remains a challenging task. Currently, most existing sequence-based methods only consider contextual features of the sequential neighbors, which are limited to capture spatial information. Based on the recent breakthrough in protein structure prediction by AlphaFold2, we propose an accurate predictor, GraphSite, for identifying DNA-binding residues based on the structural models predicted by AlphaFold2. Here, we convert the binding site prediction problem into a graph node classification task and employ a transformer-based variant model to take the protein structural information into account. By leveraging predicted protein structures and graph transformer, GraphSite substantially improves over the latest sequence-based and structure-based methods. The algorithm is further confirmed on the independent test set of 181 proteins, where GraphSite surpasses the state-of-the-art structure-based method by 16.4% in area under the precision-recall curve and 11.2% in Matthews correlation coefficient, respectively. We provide the datasets, the predicted structures and the source codes along with the pre-trained models of GraphSite at https://github.com/biomed-AI/GraphSite. The GraphSite web server is freely available at https://biomed.nscc-gz.cn/apps/GraphSite.

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Constructing appropriate representations of molecules lies at the core of numerous tasks such as material science, chemistry, and drug designs. Recent researches abstract molecules as attributed graphs and employ graph neural networks (GNN) for molecular representation learning, which have made remarkable achievements in molecular graph modeling. Albeit powerful, current models either are based on local aggregation operations and thus miss higher-order graph properties or focus on only node information without fully using the edge information. For this sake, we propose a Communicative Message Passing Transformer (CoMPT) neural network to improve the molecular graph representation by reinforcing message interactions between nodes and edges based on the Transformer architecture. Unlike the previous transformer-style GNNs that treat molecule as a fully connected graph, we introduce a message diffusion mechanism to leverage the graph connectivity inductive bias and reduce the message enrichment explosion. Extensive experiments demonstrated that the proposed model obtained superior performances (around 4% on average) against state-of-the-art baselines on seven chemical property datasets (graph-level tasks) and two chemical shift datasets (node-level tasks). Further visualization studies also indicated a better representation capacity achieved by our model.

Summary Single-cell RNA sequencing technology promotes the profiling of single-cell transcriptomes at an unprecedented throughput and resolution. However, in scRNA-seq studies, only a low amount of sequenced mRNA in each cell leads to missing detection for a portion of mRNA molecules, i.e. the dropout problem which hinders various downstream analyses. Therefore, it is necessary to develop robust and effective imputation methods for the increasing scRNA-seq data. In this study, we have developed an imputation method (GraphSCI) to impute the dropout events in scRNA-seq data based on the graph convolution networks. Extensive experiments demonstrated that GraphSCI outperforms other state-of-the-art methods for imputation on both simulated and real scRNA-seq data. Meanwhile, GraphSCI is able to accurately infer gene-to-gene relationships and the inferred gene-to-gene relationships could also provide powerful assistance for imputation dynamically during the training process, which is a key promotion of GraphSCI compared with other imputation algorithms.

Motivation: Accurately predicting cancer prognosis is necessary to choose precise strategies of treatment for patients. One of effective approaches in the prediction is the integration of multi-omics data, which reduces the impact of noise within single omics data. However, integrating multi-omics data brings large number of redundant variables and relative small sample sizes. In this study, we employed Autoencoder networks to extract important features that were then input to the proportional hazards model to predict the cancer prognosis. Results: The method was applied to 12 common cancers from the Cancer Genome Atlas. The results show that the multi-omics averagely improves 4.1% C-index for prognosis prediction over single mRNA data, and our method outperforms previous approaches by at least 7.4%. A comparison of the contribution of single omics data show that mRNA contributes the most, followed by the DNA methylation, miRNA, and the copy number variation. In the case study for differential gene expression analysis, we identified 161 differentially expressed genes in the cervical cancer, among which 77 genes (65.8%) have been proven to be associated with cancer. In addition, we performed the cross-cancer test where the model trained on one cancer was used to predict the prognosis of another cancer, and found 23 pairs of cancers have a C-index larger than 0.5, with the largest value of 0.68. Thus, this study has provided a deep learning framework to effectively integrate multiple omics data to predict cancer prognosis.