PLoS ONE (Jan 2022)

Predicting compound-protein interaction using hierarchical graph convolutional networks.

  • Danh Bui-Thi,
  • Emmanuel Rivière,
  • Pieter Meysman,
  • Kris Laukens

DOI
https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0258628
Journal volume & issue
Vol. 17, no. 7
p. e0258628

Abstract

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MotivationConvolutional neural networks have enabled unprecedented breakthroughs in a variety of computer vision tasks. They have also drawn much attention from other domains, including drug discovery and drug development. In this study, we develop a computational method based on convolutional neural networks to tackle a fundamental question in drug discovery and development, i.e. the prediction of compound-protein interactions based on compound structure and protein sequence. We propose a hierarchical graph convolutional network (HGCN) to encode small molecules. The HGCN aggregates a molecule embedding from substructure embeddings, which are synthesized from atom embeddings. As small molecules usually share substructures, computing a molecule embedding from those common substructures allows us to learn better generic models. We then combined the HGCN with a one-dimensional convolutional network to construct a complete model for predicting compound-protein interactions. Furthermore we apply an explanation technique, Grad-CAM, to visualize the contribution of each amino acid into the prediction.ResultsExperiments using different datasets show the improvement of our model compared to other GCN-based methods and a sequence based method, DeepDTA, in predicting compound-protein interactions. Each prediction made by the model is also explainable and can be used to identify critical residues mediating the interaction.