arXiv:2607.17412cs.LG2026-07

用强化学习模拟淀粉样纤维配体协同堆积,提升药物设计精度。

CORAL: Learning Amyloid Fibril Ligand Docking with Cooperative Binding Rewards

论文配图:CORAL: Learning Amyloid Fibril Ligand Docking with Cooperative Binding Rewards
图 1 · 摘自论文原文
  • 通过强化学习训练生成模型,捕捉配体在β-螺旋沟槽中的堆叠机制。
  • 在实验结构和评估集上,构象质量与结合亲和力相关性均优于现有方法。
  • 适合神经退行性疾病药物研发人员,尤其关注纤维靶点的分子对接者。

阿尔茨海默病和帕金森病等神经退行性疾病以蛋白质异常聚集形成淀粉样纤维为特征,能特异性结合这些纤维的小分子有望成为诊断工具、成像探针或治疗药物。但预测这类配体如何结合纤维,面临两大挑战:其一,已解析的淀粉样-配体复合物晶体结构极为稀少,即使近年冷冻电镜技术进步,也仅有少量被结构表征,难以开展监督式建模;其二,淀粉样纤维的结合模式与球状蛋白截然不同——配体嵌入纵向β-螺旋沟槽并沿纤维轴协同堆叠,现有对接模型无法捕捉此几何特性。为此,我们提出CORAL(COopeRative Amyloid Ligand docking),一种基于强化学习的生成式对接框架,训练模型生成符合β-螺旋沟槽几何特征的配体构象分布。其奖励函数显式引入配体间堆叠能量与蛋白-配体结合亲和力,直接体现淀粉样纤维的特异性结合机制。我们还构建了一个由专家验证的模型生成构象组成的精细评估集。在实验解析结构及该评估集上的实验表明,相比现有对接基线,本方法在构象质量和结合亲和力相关性方面均有显著提升。

原文摘要 · Abstract (English)

A hallmark of neurodegenerative diseases such as Alzheimer's and Parkinson's is the aberrant aggregation of proteins into amyloid fibrils, and small molecules that selectively bind to these fibrils hold promise as diagnostics, imaging probes, and therapeutics. Predicting how such ligands bind to fibril targets, however, presents two fundamental challenges. First, resolved co-crystal structures of amyloid-ligand complexes are exceptionally scarce; even with recent advances in cryo-EM only a handful have been structurally characterized, making supervised training of docking models impractical for this target class. Second, amyloid fibrils present a binding mode fundamentally different from globular proteins: ligands intercalate into longitudinal cross-$β$ grooves and stack cooperatively along the fibril axis, a geometry that existing docking models are not designed to capture. To address these challenges, we present CORAL (COopeRative Amyloid Ligand docking), a reinforcement learning framework that trains a generative docking model to produce ligand pose distributions tailored to the cross-$β$ groove geometry. Our reward explicitly incorporates cooperative ligand-ligand stacking energy alongside protein-ligand docking affinity, directly capturing the distinctive binding geometry of amyloid fibrils. We further introduce a curated evaluation set of amyloid-ligand complexes constructed from model-generated poses validated by domain experts. Experiments on both experimentally resolved structures and this evaluation set demonstrate improved pose quality and binding affinity correlation over existing docking baselines.

分子对接强化学习淀粉样纤维药物设计

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