Surface-based multimodal protein–ligand binding affinity prediction

In the field of drug discovery, accurately and effectively predicting the binding affinity between proteins and ligands is crucial for drug screening and optimization. However, current research primarily utilizes representations based on sequence or structure to predict protein-ligand binding affinity, with relatively less study on protein surface information, which is crucial for protein-ligand interactions. Moreover, when dealing with multimodal information of proteins, traditional approaches typically concatenate features from different modalities in a straightforward manner without considering the heterogeneity among them, which results in an inability to effectively exploit the complementary between modalities.