DNSS2: improved ab initio protein secondary structure prediction using
advanced deep learning architectures
Abstract
Accurate prediction of protein secondary structure (alpha-helix,
beta-strand and coil) is a crucial step for protein inter-residue
contact prediction and ab initio tertiary structure prediction. In a
previous study, we developed a deep belief network-based protein
secondary structure method (DNSS1) and successfully advanced the
prediction accuracy beyond 80%. In this work, we developed multiple
advanced deep learning architectures (DNSS2) to further improve
secondary structure prediction. The major improvements over the DNSS1
method include (i) designing and integrating six advanced
one-dimensional deep
convolutional/recurrent/residual/memory/fractal/inception networks to
predict secondary structure, and (ii) using more sensitive profile
features inferred from Hidden Markov model (HMM) and multiple sequence
alignment (MSA). Most of the deep learning architectures are novel for
protein secondary structure prediction. DNSS2 was systematically
benchmarked on two independent test datasets with eight state-of-art
tools and consistently ranked as one of the best methods. Particularly,
DNSS2 was tested on the 82 protein targets of 2018 CASP13 experiment and
achieved the best Q3 score of 83.74% and SOV score of 72.46%. DNSS2 is
freely available at: https://github.com/multicom-toolbox/DNSS2.