SAINT-Angle: self-attention augmented inception-inside-inception network and transfer learning improve protein backbone torsion angle prediction

Motivation Protein structure provides insight into how proteins interact with one another as well as their functions in living organisms. Protein backbone torsion angles (ϕ and ψ) prediction is a key sub-problem in predicting protein structures. However, reliable determination of backbone torsion angles using conventional experimental methods is slow and expensive. Therefore, considerable effort is being put into developing computational methods for predicting backbone angles. Results We present SAINT-Angle, a highly accurate method for predicting protein backbone torsion angles using a self-attention based deep learning network called SAINT, which was previously developed for the protein secondary structure prediction. We extended and improved the existing SAINT architecture as well as used transfer learning to predict backbone angles. We compared the performance of SAINT-Angle with the state-of-the-art methods through an extensive evaluation study on a collection of benchmark datasets, namely, TEST2016, TEST2018, CAMEO, and CASP. The experimental results suggest that our proposed self-attention based network, together with transfer learning, has achieved notable improvements over the best alternate methods. Availability and implementation SAINT-Angle is freely available as an open-source project at https://github.com/bayzidlab/SAINT-Angle. Contact shams_bayzid@cse.buet.ac.bd Supplementary information Supplementary material SM.pdf.