Uni-Fold Symmetry: Harnessing Symmetry in Folding Large Protein Complexes

Deep folding models have revolutionized the conventional methods of protein complex prediction. However, applying them to large protein oligomers is not easy. These models generally require copying the sequences of identical subunits to capture the in-between relationships. Accordingly, the scales of target protein complexes are strictly limited due to the cubic complexity of these models. To address this issue, we propose UF-Symmetry (Uni-Fold Symmetry), which is extricated from the need of sequence copying via harnessing the intrinsic symmetry of large protein oligomers. Taking the sequences of the asymmetric unit (AU) and a pre-specified symmetry group, UF-Symmetry learns to fold the AU and to assemble the complex structure in an end-to-end manner. By reducing the input scales from entire assemblies to AUs, UF-Symmetry allows to predict much larger assemblies with significant acceleration: for a complex of 4-fold cyclic symmetry (C4) and AU size of 512, UF-Symmetry achieves approximately 20 times acceleration to current methods. On a benchmark of recently released PDB multimers, UF-Symmetry approximately halves the failure rate of current methods and achieves approaching accuracy on commonly successful cases.