March 10, 2022 | Richard Evans, Michael O'Neill, Alexander Pritzel, Natasha Antropova, Andrew Senior, Tim Green, Augustin Zidek, Russ Bates, Sam Blackwell, Jason Yim, Olaf Ronneberger, Sebastian Bodenstein, Michal Zielinski, Alex Bridgland, Anna Potapenko, Andrew Cowie, Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool, Rishub Jain, Ellen Clancy, Pushmeet Kohli, John Jumper and Demis Hassabis
AlphaFold-Multimer is a model trained to predict the structures of multi-chain protein complexes with higher accuracy than previous methods. While AlphaFold has been successful in predicting single-chain protein structures, predicting multi-chain complexes remains challenging. AlphaFold-Multimer is specifically trained on multimeric inputs with known stoichiometry, allowing it to predict interfaces between chains more accurately. On a benchmark dataset of 17 heterodimer proteins without templates, AlphaFold-Multimer achieves at least medium accuracy (DockQ ≥ 0.49) on 13 targets and high accuracy (DockQ ≥ 0.8) on 7 targets, compared to 9 targets of at least medium accuracy and 4 of high accuracy for the previous state-of-the-art system. It also predicts structures for a large dataset of 4,446 recent protein complexes, achieving high accuracy on 26% of cases for heteromeric interfaces and 36% for homomeric interfaces. The model improves upon previous methods by incorporating multi-chain features, handling symmetry, and using a modified loss function to better capture interface interactions. The model is trained on a dataset including multimers and is capable of handling multi-chain inputs during both training and inference. The model's performance is evaluated using DockQ scores, which measure the quality of predicted interfaces. AlphaFold-Multimer outperforms existing methods, including those based on AlphaFold, in predicting protein complex structures. The model's confidence metric combines predicted interface TM-score (ipTM) and single-chain TM-score (pTM) to provide a more accurate assessment of model performance. The model is implemented in Python and is available on GitHub.AlphaFold-Multimer is a model trained to predict the structures of multi-chain protein complexes with higher accuracy than previous methods. While AlphaFold has been successful in predicting single-chain protein structures, predicting multi-chain complexes remains challenging. AlphaFold-Multimer is specifically trained on multimeric inputs with known stoichiometry, allowing it to predict interfaces between chains more accurately. On a benchmark dataset of 17 heterodimer proteins without templates, AlphaFold-Multimer achieves at least medium accuracy (DockQ ≥ 0.49) on 13 targets and high accuracy (DockQ ≥ 0.8) on 7 targets, compared to 9 targets of at least medium accuracy and 4 of high accuracy for the previous state-of-the-art system. It also predicts structures for a large dataset of 4,446 recent protein complexes, achieving high accuracy on 26% of cases for heteromeric interfaces and 36% for homomeric interfaces. The model improves upon previous methods by incorporating multi-chain features, handling symmetry, and using a modified loss function to better capture interface interactions. The model is trained on a dataset including multimers and is capable of handling multi-chain inputs during both training and inference. The model's performance is evaluated using DockQ scores, which measure the quality of predicted interfaces. AlphaFold-Multimer outperforms existing methods, including those based on AlphaFold, in predicting protein complex structures. The model's confidence metric combines predicted interface TM-score (ipTM) and single-chain TM-score (pTM) to provide a more accurate assessment of model performance. The model is implemented in Python and is available on GitHub.