Massive experimental quantification allows interpretable deep learning of protein aggregation

Protein aggregation is a pathological hallmark of more than 50 human diseases and a major problem for biotechnology. Methods have been proposed to predict aggregation from sequence, but these have been trained and evaluated on small and biased experimental datasets. Here we directly address this dat...

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Bibliographic Details
Authors: Thompson, Mike, Martín, Mariano, Sanmartín Olmo, Trinidad, Rajesh, Chandana, Koo, Peter K., Bolognesi, Benedetta, Lehner, Ben, 1978-
Format: article
Status:Published version
Publication Date:2025
Country:España
Institution:Varias* (Consorci de Biblioteques Universitáries de Catalunya, Centre de Serveis Científics i Acadèmics de Catalunya)
Repository:Recercat. Dipósit de la Recerca de Catalunya
OAI Identifier:oai:recercat.cat:10230/71148
Online Access:http://hdl.handle.net/10230/71148
http://dx.doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.adt5111
Access Level:Open access
Keyword:Proteïnes--Agregació
Description
Summary:Protein aggregation is a pathological hallmark of more than 50 human diseases and a major problem for biotechnology. Methods have been proposed to predict aggregation from sequence, but these have been trained and evaluated on small and biased experimental datasets. Here we directly address this data shortage by experimentally quantifying the aggregation of >100,000 protein sequences. This unprecedented dataset reveals the limited performance of existing computational methods and allows us to train CANYA, a convolution-attention hybrid neural network that accurately predicts aggregation from sequence. We adapt genomic neural network interpretability analyses to reveal CANYA's decision-making process and learned grammar. Our results illustrate the power of massive experimental analysis of random sequence-spaces and provide an interpretable and robust neural network model to predict aggregation.