PersGNN: Applying Topological Data Analysis and Geometric Deep Learning to Structure-Based Protein Function Prediction
Abstract
Understanding protein structure-function relationships is a key challenge in
computational biology, with applications across the biotechnology and pharmaceutical
industries. While it is known that protein structure directly impacts protein function,
many functional prediction tasks use only protein sequence. In this work, we isolate
protein structure to make functional annotations for proteins in the Protein Data Bank
in order to study the expressiveness of different structure-based prediction schemes. We
present PersGNN - an end-to-end trainable deep learning model that combines graph
representation learning with topological data analysis to capture a complex set of both
local and global structural features. While variations of these techniques have been
successfully applied to proteins before, we demonstrate that our hybridized approach,
PersGNN, outperforms either method on its own as well as a baseline neural network that
learns from the same information. PersGNN achieves a 9.3% boost in area under the
precision recall curve (AUPR) compared to the best individual model, as well as high F1
scores across different gene ontology categories, indicating the transferability of this
approach.