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An interpretable alphabet for local protein structure search based on amino acid neighborhoods

2025· article· en· W4413491758 on OpenAlexfundno aff
Saba Zerefa, Pramesh Singh, Samantha Petti

Bibliographic record

VenueBioinformatics · 2025
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldBiochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
TopicProtein Structure and Dynamics
Canadian institutionsnot available
FundersCanadian Aeronautics and Space InstituteWellcome Trust
KeywordsAlphabetComputer scienceAmino acidComputational biologyArtificial intelligenceBiologyGenetics

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

MOTIVATION: Recent advancements in protein structure prediction methods have vastly increased the size of databases of protein structures, necessitating fast methods for protein structure comparison. Search methods that find structurally similar proteins can be applied to find remote homologs, study the functional relationships among proteins, and aid in protein engineering tasks. RESULTS: We design a "3Dn" structural alphabet that encodes the local neighborhoods around each amino acid in an interpretable way. In a search benchmark task, a combination of our alphabet and Foldseek's 3Di alphabet, outperforms each alphabet individually and ranks best among local search methods that do not require amino acid identity information. We provide software tools that enable the exploration of novel alphabets and combinations of alphabets for protein structure search. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The code is freely available at https://github.com/spetti/structure_comparison and at Zenodo https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.15734371.

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.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.001
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.007
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Methods · Consensus signal: Methods
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.020

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0010.007
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0010.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0010.001
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0010.001
Scholarly communication0.0010.002
Open science0.0020.002
Research integrity0.0010.001
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0060.002

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 head0.005
GPT teacher head0.258
Teacher spread0.253 · 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

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designSimulation or modeling
Domainnot available
GenreMethods

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations1
Published2025
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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