Protein contact prediction based on the Tiramisu deep learning architecture

Abstract: Experimentally determining protein structure is a hard problem, with applications in both medicine and industry. Predicting protein structure is also difficult. Predicted contacts between residues within a protein is helpful during protein structure prediction. Recent state-of-the-art models have used deep learning to improve protein contact prediction. This thesis presents a new deep learning model for protein contact prediction, TiramiProt. It is based on the Tiramisu deep learning architecture, and trained and evaluated on the same data as the PconsC4 protein contact prediction model. 228 models using different combinations of hyperparameters were trained until convergence. The final TiramiProt model performs on par with two current state-of-the-art protein contact prediction models, PconsC4 and RaptorX-Contact, across a range of different metrics. A Python package and a Singularity container for running TiramiProt are available at https://gitlab.com/nikos.t.renhuldt/TiramiProt.