通过结构与功能联合学习,自动发现蛋白质的有意义功能单元。
PUFFIN: Protein Unit Discovery with Functional Supervision

- 用图神经网络对残基结构图进行分组,结合功能监督划分蛋白单元。
- 发现的单元在结构上连贯,且与分子功能有显著关联。
- 适合研究蛋白结构-功能关系的生物信息学与计算生物学工作者。
蛋白质通过残基集团的协同作用实现生物功能,这些集团构成介于单个残基与完整蛋白质之间的中间尺度结构单元,称为蛋白单元。理解这些单元及其与功能的关联,有助于深入揭示蛋白质功能机制。然而,现有方法或仅关注残基级信号,或依赖人工注释,或忽略功能信息进行结构分割,限制了结构-功能关系的可解释分析。本文提出PUFFIN,一种数据驱动的蛋白单元发现框架,通过联合学习结构划分与功能监督实现。将蛋白质表示为残基级结构图,采用具备结构感知能力的池化机制的图神经网络,将每个蛋白划分为多残基单元,并利用功能监督引导分区结果。实验表明,所学单元具有良好的结构一致性,与分子功能存在系统性关联,且与人工标注的InterPro注释有显著对应。结果证明,PUFFIN提供了一个可解释的框架,用于分析蛋白结构-功能关系。代码已开源:https://github.com/boun-tabi-lifelu/puffin。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Proteins carry out biological functions through the coordinated action of groups of residues organized into structural arrangements. These arrangements, which we refer to as protein units, exist at an intermediate scale, being larger than individual residues yet smaller than entire proteins. A deeper understanding of protein function can be achieved by identifying these units and their associations with function. However, existing approaches either focus on residue-level signals, rely on curated annotations, or segment protein structures without incorporating functional information, thereby limiting interpretable analysis of structure-function relationships. We introduce PUFFIN, a data-driven framework for discovering protein units by jointly learning structural partitioning and functional supervision. PUFFIN represents proteins as residue-level structure graphs and applies a graph neural network with a structure-aware pooling mechanism that partitions each protein into multi-residue units, with functional supervision that shapes the partition. We show that the learned units are structurally coherent, exhibit organized associations with molecular function, and show meaningful correspondence with curated InterPro annotations. Together, these results demonstrate that PUFFIN provides an interpretable framework for analyzing structure-function relationships using learned protein units and their statistical function associations. We made our source code available at https://github.com/boun-tabi-lifelu/puffin.
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