Utilizing artificial intelligence system to build the digital structural proteome of reef-building corals

Abstract

Reef-building corals play an important role in the marine ecosystem, and analyzing their proteomes from a structural perspective will exert positive effects on exploring their biology. Here we integrated mass spectrometry with newly published ColabFold to obtain digital structural proteomes of dominant reef-building corals. 8,382 proteins co-expressed in A. muricata, M. foliosa and P. verrucosa were identified, then 8,166 of them got predicted structures after around 4,060 GPU hours of computation. The resulting dataset covers 83.6% of residues with a confident prediction, while 25.9% have very high confidence. Our work provides insight-worthy predictions for coral research, confirms the reliability of ColabFold in practice, and is expected to be a reference case in the impending high-throughput era of structural proteomics.