Motivation: Protein structure refinement is an important step of protein structure prediction. Existing approaches have generally used a single scoring function combined with Monte Carlo method or Molecular Dynamics algorithm. The one-dimension optimization of a single energy function may take the structure too far away without a constraint. The basic motivation of our study is to reduce the bias problem caused by minimizing only a single energy function due to the very diversity of different protein structures.
Results: We report a new Artificial Intelligence-based protein structure Refinement method called AIR. Its fundamental idea is to use multiple energy functions as multi-objectives in an effort to correct the potential inaccuracy from a single function. A multi-objective particle swarm optimization algorithm-based structure refinement is designed, where each structure is considered as a particle in the protocol. With the refinement iterations, the particles move around. The quality of particles in each iteration is evaluated by three energy functions, and the non-dominated particles are put into a set called Pareto set. After enough iteration times, particles from the Pareto set are screened and part of the top solutions are outputted as the final refined structures. The multi-objective energy function optimization strategy designed in the AIR protocol provides a different constraint view of the structure, by extending the one-dimension optimization to a new three-dimension space optimization driven by the multi-objective particle swarm optimization engine. Experimental results on CASP11, CASP12 refinement targets and blind tests in CASP 13 turn to be promising.
Availability and implementation: The AIR is available online at: www.csbio.sjtu.edu.cn/bioinf/AIR/.
Supplementary information: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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