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Zuobai Zhang

zuobai.zhang@mila.quebec
PhD - Université de Montréal
Supervisor
Jian Tang
Website
Github
Google Scholar

Publications

Evaluating Representation Learning on the Protein Structure Universe
Arian Rokkum Jamasb
Alex Morehead
Chaitanya K. Joshi
Zuobai Zhang
Kieran Didi
Simon V Mathis
Charles Harris
Jian Tang
Jianlin Cheng
Pietro Lio
Tom Leon Blundell
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Str2Str: A Score-based Framework for Zero-shot Protein Conformation Sampling
Jiarui Lu
Bozitao Zhong
Zuobai Zhang
Jian Tang
2024-01-16
ICLR.cc/2024/Conference (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Pretrainable Geometric Graph Neural Network for Antibody Affinity Maturation
Huiyu Cai
Zuobai Zhang
Mingkai Wang
Bozitao Zhong
Yanling Wu
Tianlei Ying
Jian Tang
2023-12-07
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
Pretrainable Geometric Graph Neural Network for Antibody Affinity Maturation
Huiyu Cai
Zuobai Zhang
Mingkai Wang
Bozitao Zhong
Yanling Wu
Tianlei Ying
Jian Tang
In the realm of antibody therapeutics development, increasing the binding affinity of an antibody to its target antigen is a crucial task. T… (see more)his paper presents GearBind, a pretrainable deep neural network designed to be effective for in silico affinity maturation. Leveraging multi-level geometric message passing alongside contrastive pretraining on protein structural data, GearBind capably models the complex interplay of atom-level interactions within protein complexes, surpassing previous state-of-the-art approaches on SKEMPI v2 in terms of Pearson correlation, mean absolute error (MAE) and root mean square error (RMSE). In silico experiments elucidate that pretraining helps GearBind become sensitive to mutation-induced binding affinity changes and reflective of amino acid substitution tendency. Using an ensemble model based on pretrained GearBind, we successfully optimize the affinity of CR3022 to the spike (S) protein of the SARS-CoV-2 Omicron strain. Our strategy yields a high success rate with up to 17-fold affinity increase. GearBind proves to be an effective tool in narrowing the search space for in vitro antibody affinity maturation, underscoring the utility of geometric deep learning and adept pre-training in macromolecule interaction modeling.
2023-12-07
bioRxiv (preprint)
doi.org
PDB-Struct: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Structure-based Protein Design
Chuanrui Wang
Bozitao Zhong
Zuobai Zhang
Narendra Chaudhary
Sanchit Misra
Jian Tang
Structure-based protein design has attracted increasing interest, with numerous methods being introduced in recent years. However, a univers… (see more)ally accepted method for evaluation has not been established, since the wet-lab validation can be overly time-consuming for the development of new algorithms, and the
2023-10-25
NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/AI4D3 (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
PDB-Struct: A Comprehensive Benchmark for Structure-based Protein Design
Chuanrui Wang
Bozitao Zhong
Zuobai Zhang
Narendra Chaudhary
Sanchit Misra
Jian Tang
Structure-based protein design has attracted increasing interest, with numerous methods being introduced in recent years. However, a univers… (see more)ally accepted method for evaluation has not been established, since the wet-lab validation can be overly time-consuming for the development of new algorithms, and the
2023-10-25
NeurIPS.cc/2023/Workshop/AI4D3 (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
DiffPack: A Torsional Diffusion Model for Autoregressive Protein Side-Chain Packing
Yang Zhang
Zuobai Zhang
Bozitao Zhong
Sanchit Misra
Jian Tang
Proteins play a critical role in carrying out biological functions, and their 3D structures are essential in determining their functions. A… (see more)ccurately predicting the conformation of protein side-chains given their backbones is important for applications in protein structure prediction, design and protein-protein interactions. Traditional methods are computationally intensive and have limited accuracy, while existing machine learning methods treat the problem as a regression task and overlook the restrictions imposed by the constant covalent bond lengths and angles. In this work, we present DiffPack, a torsional diffusion model that learns the joint distribution of side-chain torsional angles, the only degrees of freedom in side-chain packing, by diffusing and denoising on the torsional space. To avoid issues arising from simultaneous perturbation of all four torsional angles, we propose autoregressively generating the four torsional angles from
openreview.net
Pre-Training Protein Encoder via Siamese Sequence-Structure Diffusion Trajectory Prediction
Zuobai Zhang
Minghao Xu
Aurelie Lozano
Vijil Chenthamarakshan
Payel Das
Jian Tang
Self-supervised pre-training methods on proteins have recently gained attention, with most approaches focusing on either protein sequences o… (see more)r structures, neglecting the exploration of their joint distribution, which is crucial for a comprehensive understanding of protein functions by integrating co-evolutionary information and structural characteristics. In this work, inspired by the success of denoising diffusion models in generative tasks, we propose the DiffPreT approach to pre-train a protein encoder by sequence-structure joint diffusion modeling. DiffPreT guides the encoder to recover the native protein sequences and structures from the perturbed ones along the joint diffusion trajectory, which acquires the joint distribution of sequences and structures. Considering the essential protein conformational variations, we enhance DiffPreT by a method called Siamese Diffusion Trajectory Prediction (SiamDiff) to capture the correlation between different conformers of a protein. SiamDiff attains this goal by maximizing the mutual information between representations of diffusion trajectories of structurally-correlated conformers. We study the effectiveness of DiffPreT and SiamDiff on both atom- and residue-level structure-based protein understanding tasks. Experimental results show that the performance of DiffPreT is consistently competitive on all tasks, and SiamDiff achieves new state-of-the-art performance, considering the mean ranks on all tasks. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/SiamDiff.
openreview.net
FusionRetro: Molecule Representation Fusion via In-Context Learning for Retrosynthetic Planning
Songtao Liu
Zhengkai Tu
Minkai Xu
Zuobai Zhang
Lu Lin
Rex Ying
Zhitao Ying
Jian Tang
Peilin Zhao
Dinghao Wu
Retrosynthetic planning aims to devise a complete multi-step synthetic route from starting materials to a target molecule. Current strategie… (see more)s use a decoupled approach of single-step retrosynthesis models and search algorithms, taking only the product as the input to predict the reactants for each planning step and ignoring valuable context information along the synthetic route. In this work, we propose a novel framework that utilizes context information for improved retrosynthetic planning. We view synthetic routes as reaction graphs and propose to incorporate context through three principled steps: encode molecules into embeddings, aggregate information over routes, and readout to predict reactants. Our approach is the first attempt to utilize in-context learning for retrosynthesis prediction in retrosynthetic planning. The entire framework can be efficiently optimized in an end-to-end fashion and produce more practical and accurate predictions. Comprehensive experiments demonstrate that by fusing in the context information over routes, our model significantly improves the performance of retrosynthetic planning over baselines that are not context-aware, especially for long synthetic routes. Code is available at https://github.com/SongtaoLiu0823/FusionRetro.
2023-07-03
Proceedings of the 40th International Conference on Machine Learning (published)
proceedings.mlr.press
openreview.net
A Systematic Study of Joint Representation Learning on Protein Sequences and Structures
Zuobai Zhang
Chuanrui Wang
Minghao Xu
Vijil Chenthamarakshan
Aurelie Lozano
Payel Das
Jian Tang
Learning effective protein representations is critical in a variety of tasks in biology such as predicting protein functions. Recent sequenc… (see more)e representation learning methods based on Protein Language Models (PLMs) excel in sequence-based tasks, but their direct adaptation to tasks involving protein structures remains a challenge. In contrast, structure-based methods leverage 3D structural information with graph neural networks and geometric pre-training methods show potential in function prediction tasks, but still suffers from the limited number of available structures. To bridge this gap, our study undertakes a comprehensive exploration of joint protein representation learning by integrating a state-of-the-art PLM (ESM-2) with distinct structure encoders (GVP, GearNet, CDConv). We introduce three representation fusion strategies and explore different pre-training techniques. Our method achieves significant improvements over existing sequence- and structure-based methods, setting new state-of-the-art for function annotation. This study underscores several important design choices for fusing protein sequence and structure information. Our implementation is available at https://github.com/DeepGraphLearning/ESM-GearNet.
2023-03-11
ArXiv (preprint)
arxiv.org
arxiv.org
Enhancing Protein Language Model with Structure-based Encoder and Pre-training
Zuobai Zhang
Minghao Xu
Aurelie Lozano
Vijil Chenthamarakshan
Payel Das
Jian Tang
Protein language models (PLMs) pre-trained on large-scale protein sequence corpora have achieved impressive performance on various downstrea… (see more)m protein understanding tasks. Despite the ability to implicitly capture inter-residue contact information, transformer-based PLMs cannot encode protein structures explicitly for better structure-aware protein representations. Besides, the power of pre-training on available protein structures has not been explored for improving these PLMs, though structures are important to determine functions. To tackle these limitations, in this work, we enhance the PLM with structure-based encoder and pre-training. We first explore feasible model architectures to combine the advantages of a state-of-the-art PLM (i.e., ESM-1b) and a state-of-the-art protein structure encoder (i.e., GearNet). We empirically verify the ESM-GearNet that connects two encoders in a series way as the most effective combination model. To further improve the effectiveness of ESM-GearNet, we pre-train it on massive unlabeled protein structures with contrastive learning, which aligns representations of co-occurring subsequences so as to capture their biological correlation. Extensive experiments on EC and GO protein function prediction benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ESM-GearNet over previous PLMs and structure encoders, and clear performance gains are further achieved by structure-based pre-training upon ESM-GearNet. The source code will be made public upon acceptance.
2023-03-06
ICLR.cc/2023/Workshop/MLDD (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net
Enhancing Protein Language Model with Structure-based Encoder and Pre-training
Zuobai Zhang
Minghao Xu
Aurelie Lozano
Vijil Chenthamarakshan
Payel Das
Jian Tang
Protein language models (PLMs) pre-trained on large-scale protein sequence corpora have achieved impressive performance on various downstrea… (see more)m protein understanding tasks. Despite the ability to implicitly capture inter-residue contact information, transformer-based PLMs cannot encode protein structures explicitly for better structure-aware protein representations. Besides, the power of pre-training on available protein structures has not been explored for improving these PLMs, though structures are important to determine functions. To tackle these limitations, in this work, we enhance the PLM with structure-based encoder and pre-training. We first explore feasible model architectures to combine the advantages of a state-of-the-art PLM (i.e., ESM-1b) and a state-of-the-art protein structure encoder (i.e., GearNet). We empirically verify the ESM-GearNet that connects two encoders in a series way as the most effective combination model. To further improve the effectiveness of ESM-GearNet, we pre-train it on massive unlabeled protein structures with contrastive learning, which aligns representations of co-occurring subsequences so as to capture their biological correlation. Extensive experiments on EC and GO protein function prediction benchmarks demonstrate the superiority of ESM-GearNet over previous PLMs and structure encoders, and clear performance gains are further achieved by structure-based pre-training upon ESM-GearNet. The source code will be made public upon acceptance.
2023-03-06
ICLR.cc/2023/Workshop/MLDD (poster)
openreview.net
openreview.net