MétaCan
Menu
Back to cohort
Record W4408203656 · doi:10.1051/bioconf/202516301001

TooT-SS: Transfer Learning using ProtBERT-BFD Language Model for Predicting Specific Substrates of Transport Proteins

2025· article· en· W4408203656 on OpenAlex
Sima Ataei, Gregory Butler

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

VenueBIO Web of Conferences · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicMachine Learning in Bioinformatics
Canadian institutionsConcordia University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaConcordia UniversityGenome Canada
KeywordsTransfer of learningComputer scienceArtificial intelligence

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Transmembrane transport proteins are essential in cell life for the passage of substrates across cell membranes. Metabolic network reconstruction requires transport reactions that describe the specific substrate transported as well as the metabolic reactions of enzyme catalysis. We utilize a protein language model called ProtBERT (Protein Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers) and transfer learning with a one-layer Feed-Forward Neural Network (FFNN) to predict 96 specific substrates. We automatically construct a dataset UniProt-SPEC-100 using the ChEBI and GO ontologies with 4,455 sequences from 96 specific substrates. This dataset is extremely imbalanced with a ratio of 1:408 between the smallest class and the largest. Our model TooT-SS predicts 83 classes out of 96 with an F1-score of 0.92 and Matthews Correlation Coefficient (MCC) of 0.91 on a hold-out test set. The results of 3-fold cross-validation experiments, particularly, on small classes show the potential of transfer learning from the ProtBERT language model for handling imbalanced datasets.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Bench or experimental · Consensus signal: Bench or experimental
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: Empirical
Teacher disagreement score0.271
Threshold uncertainty score0.566

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.000
Open science0.0000.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0000.000

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.020
GPT teacher head0.277
Teacher spread0.256 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it