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December 8, 2025Nature Communications26 citationsOpen Access

Benchmarking all-atom biomolecular structure prediction with FoldBench

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LQLifeng QiaoHWHao Wu

Key Points

  • Accurate structure prediction of biomolecular complexes is essential for biological understanding and therapeutic design.
  • Evaluation shows that ligand docking accuracy decreases notably with lower similarity to training set, alongside challenges in antibody-antigen predictions.
  • Deep learning advancements continue to improve all-atom structure prediction, yet limitations persist in model performance across various tasks.
  • FoldBench's extensive benchmark dataset of biological assemblies provides critical insights for future model refinement and evaluation.

Abstract

Accurate prediction of biomolecular complex structures is fundamental for understanding biological processes and rational therapeutic design. Recent advances in deep learning methods, particularly all-atom structure prediction models, have significantly expanded their capabilities to include diverse biomolecular entities, such as proteins, nucleic acids, ligands, and ions. However, comprehensive benchmarks covering multiple interaction types and molecular diversity remain scarce, limiting fair and rigorous assessment of model performance and generalizability. To address this gap, we introduce FoldBench, an extensive benchmark dataset consisting of 1522 biological assemblies categorized into nine distinct prediction tasks. Our evaluations reveal critical performance dependencies, showing that ligand docking accuracy notably diminishes as ligand similarity to the training set decreases, a pattern similarly observed in protein-protein interaction modeling. Furthermore, antibody-antigen predictions remain particularly challenging, with current methods exhibiting failure rates exceeding 50%. Among evaluated models, AlphaFold 3 consistently demonstrates superior accuracy across the majority of tasks. In summary, our results highlight significant advancements yet reveal persistent limitations within the field, providing crucial insights and benchmarks to inform future model development and refinement.

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Cite This Study

Qiao et al. (2025) studied this question.

synapsesocial.com/papers/693624ad4fa91c937236c648https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67127-3
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