Alignment-free estimation of sequence conservation for identifying functional sites using protein sequence embeddings
Abstract
Protein language modeling is a fast-emerging deep learning method in bioinformatics with diverse applications such as structure prediction and protein design. However, application toward estimating sequence conservation for functional site prediction has not been systematically explored. Here, we present a method for the alignment-free estimation of sequence conservation using sequence embeddings generated from protein language models. Comprehensive benchmarks across publicly available protein language models reveal that ESM2 models provide the best performance to computational cost ratio for conservation estimation. Applying our method to full-length protein sequences, we demonstrate that embedding-based methods are not sensitive to the order of conserved elements—conservation scores can be calculated for multidomain proteins in a single run, without the need to separate individual domains. Our method can also identify conserved functional sites within fast-evolving sequence regions (such as domain inserts), which we demonstrate through the identification of conserved phosphorylation motifs in variable insert segments in protein kinases. Overall, embedding-based conservation analysis is a broadly applicable method for identifying potential functional sites in any full-length protein sequence and estimating conservation in an alignment-free manner. To run this on your protein sequence of interest, try our scripts at https://github.com/esbgkannan/kibby.
Document Details
- Document Type
- Pub Defense Publication
- Publication Date
- Jan 01, 2023
- Source ID
- 10.1093/bib/bbac599
Entities
People
- Natarajan Kannan
- Sheng Li
- Wayland Yeung
- Zhongliang Zhou
Organizations
- University of Georgia
- University of Virginia