Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Temizer, Asu Büşra, Uludoğan, Gökçe, Özçelik, Rıza, Koulani, Taha, Ozkirimli, Elif, Ulgen, Kutlu O., Karalı, Nilgün, Özgür, Arzucan
Format: Preprint
Published: 2022
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14642
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866912182373974016
author Temizer, Asu Büşra
Uludoğan, Gökçe
Özçelik, Rıza
Koulani, Taha
Ozkirimli, Elif
Ulgen, Kutlu O.
Karalı, Nilgün
Özgür, Arzucan
author_facet Temizer, Asu Büşra
Uludoğan, Gökçe
Özçelik, Rıza
Koulani, Taha
Ozkirimli, Elif
Ulgen, Kutlu O.
Karalı, Nilgün
Özgür, Arzucan
contents Machine learning models have found numerous successful applications in computational drug discovery. A large body of these models represents molecules as sequences since molecular sequences are easily available, simple, and informative. The sequence-based models often segment molecular sequences into pieces called chemical words (analogous to the words that make up sentences in human languages) and then apply advanced natural language processing techniques for tasks such as $\textit{de novo}$ drug design, property prediction, and binding affinity prediction. However, the chemical characteristics and significance of these building blocks, chemical words, remain unexplored. This study aims to investigate the chemical vocabularies generated by popular subword tokenization algorithms, namely Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), WordPiece, and Unigram, and identify key chemical words associated with protein-ligand binding. To this end, we build a language-inspired pipeline that treats high affinity ligands of protein targets as documents and selects key chemical words making up those ligands based on tf-idf weighting. Further, we conduct case studies on a number of protein families to analyze the impact of key chemical words on binding. Through our analysis, we find that these key chemical words are specific to protein targets and correspond to known pharmacophores and functional groups. Our findings will help shed light on the chemistry captured by the chemical words, and by machine learning models for drug discovery at large.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2210_14642
institution arXiv
publishDate 2022
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Exploring Data-Driven Chemical SMILES Tokenization Approaches to Identify Key Protein-Ligand Binding Moieties
Temizer, Asu Büşra
Uludoğan, Gökçe
Özçelik, Rıza
Koulani, Taha
Ozkirimli, Elif
Ulgen, Kutlu O.
Karalı, Nilgün
Özgür, Arzucan
Biomolecules
Machine learning models have found numerous successful applications in computational drug discovery. A large body of these models represents molecules as sequences since molecular sequences are easily available, simple, and informative. The sequence-based models often segment molecular sequences into pieces called chemical words (analogous to the words that make up sentences in human languages) and then apply advanced natural language processing techniques for tasks such as $\textit{de novo}$ drug design, property prediction, and binding affinity prediction. However, the chemical characteristics and significance of these building blocks, chemical words, remain unexplored. This study aims to investigate the chemical vocabularies generated by popular subword tokenization algorithms, namely Byte Pair Encoding (BPE), WordPiece, and Unigram, and identify key chemical words associated with protein-ligand binding. To this end, we build a language-inspired pipeline that treats high affinity ligands of protein targets as documents and selects key chemical words making up those ligands based on tf-idf weighting. Further, we conduct case studies on a number of protein families to analyze the impact of key chemical words on binding. Through our analysis, we find that these key chemical words are specific to protein targets and correspond to known pharmacophores and functional groups. Our findings will help shed light on the chemistry captured by the chemical words, and by machine learning models for drug discovery at large.
title Exploring Data-Driven Chemical SMILES Tokenization Approaches to Identify Key Protein-Ligand Binding Moieties
topic Biomolecules
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2210.14642