Protein–Protein Interfaces: A Graph Neural Network Approach

Protein–protein interactions (PPIs) are fundamental processes governing cellular functions, crucial for understanding biological systems at the molecular level. Compared to experimental methods for PPI prediction and site identification, computational deep learning approaches represent an affordable and efficient solution to tackle these problems. Since protein structure can be summarized as a graph, graph neural networks (GNNs) represent the ideal deep learning architecture for the task. In this work, PPI prediction is modeled as a node-focused binary classification task using a GNN to determine whether a generic residue is part of the interface. Biological data were obtained from the Protein Data Bank in Europe (PDBe), leveraging the Protein Interfaces, Surfaces, and Assemblies (PISA) service. To gain a deeper understanding of how proteins interact, the data obtained from PISA were assembled into three datasets: Whole, Interface, and Chain, consisting of data on the whole protein, couples of interacting chains, and single chains, respectively. These three datasets correspond to three different nuances of the problem: identifying interfaces between protein complexes, between chains of the same protein, and interface regions in general. The results indicate that GNNs are capable of solving each of the three tasks with very good performance levels.