CoGANPPIS: A Coevolution-enhanced Global Attention Neural Network for Protein-Protein Interaction Site Prediction

Protein-protein interactions are of great importance in biochemical processes. Accurate prediction of protein-protein interaction sites (PPIs) is crucial for our understanding of biological mechanism. Although numerous approaches have been developed recently and achieved gratifying results, there are still two limitations: (1) Most existing models have excavated a number of useful input features, but failed to take coevolutionary features into account, which could provide clues for inter-residue relationships; (2) The attention-based models only allocate attention weights for neighboring residues, instead of doing it globally, which may limit the model's prediction performance since some residues being far away from the target residues might also matter. We propose a coevolution-enhanced global attention neural network, a sequence-based deep learning model for PPIs prediction, called CoGANPPIS. Specifically, CoGANPPIS utilizes three layers in parallel for feature extraction: (1) Local-level representation aggregation layer, which aggregates the neighboring residues' features as the local feature representation; (2) Global-level representation learning layer, which employs a novel coevolution-enhanced global attention mechanism to allocate attention weights to all residues on the same protein sequences; (3) Coevolutionary information learning layer, which applies CNN & pooling to coevolutionary information to obtain the coevolutionary profile representation. Then, the three outputs are concatenated and passed into several fully connected layers for the final prediction. Extensive experiments on two benchmark datasets have been conducted, demonstrating that our proposed model achieves the state-of-the-art performance.