A key challenge of modern biology is to uncover the functional role of the protein entities that compose cellular proteomes. To this end, the availability of reliable three-dimensional atomic models of proteins is often crucial. This protocol presents a community-wide web-based method using RaptorX (http://raptorx.uchicago.edu/) for protein secondary structure prediction, template-based tertiary structure modeling, alignment quality assessment and sophisticated probabilistic alignment sampling. RaptorX distinguishes itself from other servers by the quality of the alignment between a target sequence and one or multiple distantly related template proteins (especially those with sparse sequence profiles) and by a novel nonlinear scoring function and a probabilistic-consistency algorithm. Consequently, RaptorX delivers high-quality structural models for many targets with only remote templates. At present, it takes RaptorX ~35 min to finish processing a sequence of 200 amino acids. Since its official release in August 2011, RaptorX has processed ~6,000 sequences submitted by ~1,600 users from around the world.

Protein secondary structure (SS) prediction is important for studying protein structure and function. When only the sequence (profile) information is used as input feature, currently the best predictors can obtain ~80% Q3 accuracy, which has not been improved in the past decade. Here we present DeepCNF (Deep Convolutional Neural Fields) for protein SS prediction. DeepCNF is a Deep Learning extension of Conditional Neural Fields (CNF), which is an integration of Conditional Random Fields (CRF) and shallow neural networks. DeepCNF can model not only complex sequence-structure relationship by a deep hierarchical architecture, but also interdependency between adjacent SS labels, so it is much more powerful than CNF. Experimental results show that DeepCNF can obtain ~84% Q3 accuracy, ~85% SOV score, and ~72% Q8 accuracy, respectively, on the CASP and CAMEO test proteins, greatly outperforming currently popular predictors. As a general framework, DeepCNF can be used to predict other protein structure properties such as contact number, disorder regions, and solvent accessibility.

This paper presents RaptorX, a statistical method for template-based protein modeling that improves alignment accuracy by exploiting structural information in a single or multiple templates. RaptorX consists of three major components: single-template threading, alignment quality prediction and multiple-template threading. This paper summarizes the methods employed by RaptorX and presents its CASP9 result analysis, aiming to identify major bottlenecks with RaptorX and template-based modeling and hopefully directions for further study. Our results show that template structural information helps a lot with both single-template and multiple-template protein threading especially when closely-related templates are unavailable and there is still large room for improvement in both alignment and template selection. The RaptorX web server is available at http://raptorx.uchicago.edu.

Change detection is a basic task of remote sensing image processing. The research objective is to identify the change information of interest and filter out the irrelevant change information as interference factors. Recently, the rise in deep learning has provided new tools for change detection, which have yielded impressive results. However, the available methods focus mainly on the difference information between multitemporal remote sensing images and lack robustness to pseudochange information. To overcome the lack of resistance in current methods to pseudochanges, in this article, we propose a new method, namely, dual attentive fully convolutional Siamese networks, for change detection in high-resolution images. Through the dual attention mechanism, long-range dependencies are captured to obtain more discriminant feature representations to enhance the recognition performance of the model. Moreover, the imbalanced sample is a serious problem in change detection, i.e., unchanged samples are much more abundant than changed samples, which is one of the main reasons for pseudochanges. We propose the weighted double-margin contrastive loss to address this problem by punishing attention to unchanged feature pairs and increasing attention to changed feature pairs. The experimental results of our method on the change detection dataset and the building change detection dataset demonstrate that compared with other baseline methods, the proposed method realizes maximum improvements of 2.9% and 4.2%, respectively, in the F1 score. Our PyTorch implementation is available at https://github.com/lehaifeng/DASNet.

Three-dimensional genome structure plays a pivotal role in gene regulation and cellular function. Single-cell analysis of genome architecture has been achieved using imaging and chromatin conformation capture methods such as Hi-C. To study variation in chromosome structure between different cell types, computational approaches are needed that can utilize sparse and heterogeneous single-cell Hi-C data. However, few methods exist that are able to accurately and efficiently cluster such data into constituent cell types. Here, we describe scHiCluster, a single-cell clustering algorithm for Hi-C contact matrices that is based on imputations using linear convolution and random walk. Using both simulated and real single-cell Hi-C data as benchmarks, scHiCluster significantly improves clustering accuracy when applied to low coverage datasets compared with existing methods. After imputation by scHiCluster, topologically associating domain (TAD)-like structures (TLSs) can be identified within single cells, and their consensus boundaries were enriched at the TAD boundaries observed in bulk cell Hi-C samples. In summary, scHiCluster facilitates visualization and comparison of single-cell 3D genomes.