SE(3) Equivalent Graph Attention Network as an Energy-Based Model for Protein Side Chain Conformation

Abstract

Protein design energy functions have been developed over decades by leveraging physical forces approximation and knowledge-derived features. However, manual feature engineering and parameter tuning might suffer from knowledge bias. Learning potential energy functions fully from crystal structure data is promising to automatically discover unknown or high-order features that contribute to the proteins energy. Here we proposed a graph attention network as an energy-based model for protein conformation, namely GraphEBM. GraphEBM is equivariant to the SE(3) group transformation, which is the important principle of modern machine learning for molecules-related tasks. GraphEBM was benchmarked on the rotamer recovery task and outperformed both Rosetta and the state-of-the-art deep learning based methods. Furthermore, GraphEBM also yielded promising results on combinatorial side chain optimization, improving 22.2%{chi} 1 rotamer recovery to the PULCHRA method on average.