Aug 2026· Bioinformatics· Vol 42· 0 citations· 31 references
Medicine
TL;DR
Pocket-PROTACs is proposed, a pocket-aware attention-based framework for predicting PROTAC-induced protein degradation from a triplet of POI, E3 ligase, and PROTAC, which consistently outperforms fingerprint-based baselines and recent deep learning methods.
Abstract
Abstract Motivation Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) enable targeted protein degradation by recruiting an E3 ubiquitin ligase to a protein of interest (POI) and forming a ternary complex. Despite their therapeutic promise, rational PROTAC design remains challenging, as degradation efficacy depends on subtle and highly structure-dependent interactions among the POI, the E3 ligase, and the bifunctional molecule. Results We propose Pocket-PROTACs, a pocket-aware attention-based framework for predicting PROTAC-induced protein degradation from a triplet of POI, E3 ligase, and PROTAC. Pocket-PROTACs encodes protein sequences using a pre-trained protein language model and represents PROTACs with a geometry-aware graph neural network over an ensemble of three-dimensional conformers. Both POI–PROTAC and E3 ligase–PROTAC interactions are explicitly modeled through a residue–atom cross-attention mechanism that captures fine-grained interaction patterns. To improve model interpretability, we introduce a pocket-aware module that incorporates structural context to guide residue-level relevance estimation, enabling multi-level attribution analysis. Experiments on two benchmark datasets show that Pocket-PROTACs consistently outperforms fingerprint-based baselines and recent deep learning methods. The learned relevance maps highlight localized interaction patterns on both the POI and the E3 ligase that are qualitatively consistent with known pocket-level features. A case study on kelch domain containing 2 (KLHDC2)-engaging bromodomain and extra-terminal domain (BET) PROTACs further demonstrates that our model accurately predicts degradation behavior and provides biologically meaningful, attention-based interpretations, offering practical support for PROTAC design and experimental investigation. Availability and implementation Source code and datasets are available at https://github.com/Adochew/Pocket-PROTACs.
Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) induce protein degradation by recruiting a target protein to an E3 ubiquitin ligase, making degradation a joint outcome of the degrader molecule and its biological context. Although public databases contain thousands of structured molecule-target-E3 records, degradation measurements are available for only a small fraction of them. Existing supervised approaches therefore leave most recorded chemical-biological relationships unused. We introduce DegradeQuery, a context-aware prediction framework that converts these label-missing records into a pretraining signal. Its counterfactual tuple pretraining objective contrasts recorded tuples with alternatives formed by replacing the target, the E3 ligase, or both, enabling the model to learn contextual associations without assigning activity pseudo-labels. The resulting representation is then fine-tuned to predict degradation from the complete molecule-target-E3 context. On the official PROTAC-8K benchmark, DegradeQuery achieves an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve of 0.9065 and an accuracy of 0.8500, outperforming the compared methods. Controlled analyses further show that the improvement is primarily attributable to tuple-level pretraining, can be recovered using only label-missing records, and remains complementary to protein language model representations. These findings demonstrate that incompletely labeled PROTAC databases contain useful relational supervision and provide a practical route for learning context-aware degradation predictors from scarce experimental labels.
Dong Xu, Zhangfan Yang, Jiantao Wu et al.· 0 citations
Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) are heterobifunctional small molecules that induce targeted protein degradation by recruiting an E3 ligase to a protein of interest. Since 2019, publication volume has accelerated, and computational methods have expanded from isolated demonstrations into practical tools for modeling PROTAC-induced ternary complexes, designing linkers, and forecasting degradation-related outcomes. Here, we present a Perspective on computational PROTAC methodologies published from 2019 to the present, organizing the field into two complementary streams: (i) constraint-driven, physics-based workflows that assemble and refine ternary complex models by enforcing geometric feasibility and evaluating pose stability using docking and molecular simulation; and (ii) data-driven workflows, including deep learning predictors and generative models that predict ternary complex structure, degradation end points, or linker chemistry from structural and assay data. We highlight representative approaches spanning restrained/tethered docking, MD-based refinement and dynamic stability scoring, coarse-grained free-energy modeling, SE(3)/E(3)-equivariant structure prediction, supervised degradation efficacy prediction, and generative linker design. We close by emphasizing persistent gaps, fragmented benchmarking, score robustness across targets and E3 ligases, and nonstandard molecular representations that currently limit generalization and reproducible, pipeline-ready deployment.
Joseph M. Schulz, R. Reynolds, Stephan C. Schürer· Journal of Chemical Informat...· 0 citations
Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) have emerged as a transformative therapeutic strategy that selectively degrades historically''undruggable''targets via the ubiquitin-proteasome system. Despite growing efforts to develop computational predictors of PROTAC degradation activity, existing supervised approaches remain severely challenged by data scarcity and imbalance across E3 ligases, limiting their ability to generalize beyond well-studied ligase contexts. In practice, labeled data are heavily concentrated on a few ligases (e.g., CRBN and VHL), while the majority of E3 ligases remain underexplored yet are critical for expanding the design space of targeted degraders. Developing methods that enable robust cross-ligase generalization with minimal labeled data is therefore essential for improving the practical utility of computational PROTAC discovery. We reformulate PROTAC degradation activity prediction across E3 ligases as a few-shot meta-learning problem and present ProMeta, a prototype-based graph neural network trained through episodic meta-learning on source-E3 tasks and evaluated on held-out target-E3 tasks through support-conditioned inference. ProMeta performs inference without updating the encoder by dynamically estimating class prototypes from minimal target-ligase support samples. On the CRBN-to-VHL benchmark, ProMeta achieves AUROC values of 0.796 under K=2, Q=3 and 0.883 under K=2, Q=5, improving by 19.9% and 6.8%, respectively, over the corresponding supervised GNN baseline. Reverse VHL-to-CRBN transfer under the same protocol yielded AUROC values of 0.702 (K=2, Q=3) and 0.821 (K=2, Q=5), confirming bidirectional applicability while revealing direction and data-regime dependence. Together, these results support ProMeta as a practical framework for cross-ligase few-shot prediction under the evaluated support/query protocols.
Yuansheng Liu, Yu-Fei Ye, Tao Tang et al.· 0 citations
Protein-RNA interactions regulate diverse biological processes and are increasingly exploited in therapeutic RNA discovery, but accurate inferences of nucleotide preferences and reliable structure prediction remain challenging. Here, we present PRIS, a unified structure-based deep-learning framework that combines two complementary components: PRISeq for nucleotide probability estimation at each RNA position and PRIScore for residue-nucleotide distance prediction to discriminate native-like from incorrect poses. Both share a feature extractor that integrates an Anti-Symmetric Graph Attention Network (A-GAT) with sparse k-Maximum Inner Product (k-MPI) attention to capture long-range interactions across large graphs. PRIScore improves the selection of native-like protein-RNA predictions generated by AlphaFold3, achieving a top-1 success rate of 81.91% on a docking benchmark, compared to 79.26% for AlphaFold3. The selected structures are then fed into PRISeq, which infers position-specific binding preferences and screens RNA libraries. On a PWM benchmark, PRISeq achieved a mean absolute error (MAE) of 0.75, outperforming FoldX, Rosetta-based scoring functions, and NA-MPNN. In virtual screening against MS2 protein, PRISeq screens 129,248 RNA hairpins within 11.95 seconds, achieving the highest EF0.5% of 14.40, approximately double the best baseline. PRIS also effectively enriches active aptamers against NELF-E and GFP while preserving sequence diversity. By integrating structure selection with binding-preference inference, PRIS provides an efficient framework for large-scale RNA library screening and aptamer design.
Yi-Hao Zhao, Jing Han, Ji-Ke Wang et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
Abstract Motivation Accurate identification of DNA-binding proteins (DBPs) and RNA-binding proteins (RBPs) is critical for elucidating transcriptional and post-transcriptional regulatory mechanisms. However, existing computational approaches often rely on inferred labels or domain-specific annotations, which limit the subsequent generalizability. Results This study aimed to introduce transformer-based classifiers for human DBPs and RBPs that rely solely on protein sequence information without engineered features or domain constraints. The models were implemented using ESM-2 with low-rank adaptation (LoRA) fine-tuning and trained on experimentally validated datasets, including chromatin immunoprecipitation sequencing (ChIP-seq) annotations for DBPs and eCLIP annotations for RBPs. Next, to evaluate biological relevance, we computed value-aware attention (VAT) scores aggregated across transformer layers to interpret model focus. In 20-fold cross-validation, the DBP model achieved an area under the receiver operating characteristic curve (AUROC) of 0.84 with a Matthews correlation coefficient (MCC) of 0.40, while the RBP model achieved an AUROC of 0.92 with an MCC of 0.46. Proteins predicted as nucleic acid-binding were enriched for known binding domains, and inspection of attention distributions revealed preferential focus on annotated functional regions rather than non-binding segments. These results demonstrate that attention-based protein language models can accurately identify nucleic acid-binding proteins directly from sequence data. Moreover, these models reveal biologically meaningful sequence determinants of binding, establishing an interpretable and scalable framework for proteome-wide characterization of protein–nucleic acid interactions. Availability and implementation Code is available on GitHub (https://github.com/CSB-hub/DRBP).
Hanjin Kim, Sung-Gwon Lee, Joo-Seong Oh et al.· Bioinformatics Advances· 0 citations
This work presents MG2Act, a structure-independent framework that translates two-step logic into sequential cross-attention, using CRBN-mediated degradation as the most data-rich representative system.
Zhiyao Zhuang, Dan Teng, Xiao-Jing Xu et al.· bioRxiv· 0 citations
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