A Morse Transform for Drug Discovery

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Tanaka, Alexander M., Asaad, Aras T., Cooper, Richard, Nanda, Vidit
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Tanaka, Alexander M.
Asaad, Aras T.
Cooper, Richard
Nanda, Vidit
author_facet Tanaka, Alexander M.
Asaad, Aras T.
Cooper, Richard
Nanda, Vidit
contents We introduce a new ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS) framework that uses piecewise linear (PL) Morse theory to predict ligand binding potential. We model ligands as simplicial complexes via a pruned Delaunay triangulation, and catalogue the critical points across multiple directional height functions. This produces a rich feature vector, consisting of crucial topological features -- peaks, troughs, and saddles -- that characterise ligand surfaces relevant to binding interactions. Unlike contemporary LBVS methods that rely on computationally-intensive deep neural networks, we require only a lightweight classifier. The Morse theoretic approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets while offering an interpretable feature vector and scalable method for ligand prioritization in early-stage drug discovery.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_04507
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle A Morse Transform for Drug Discovery
Tanaka, Alexander M.
Asaad, Aras T.
Cooper, Richard
Nanda, Vidit
Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
We introduce a new ligand-based virtual screening (LBVS) framework that uses piecewise linear (PL) Morse theory to predict ligand binding potential. We model ligands as simplicial complexes via a pruned Delaunay triangulation, and catalogue the critical points across multiple directional height functions. This produces a rich feature vector, consisting of crucial topological features -- peaks, troughs, and saddles -- that characterise ligand surfaces relevant to binding interactions. Unlike contemporary LBVS methods that rely on computationally-intensive deep neural networks, we require only a lightweight classifier. The Morse theoretic approach achieves state-of-the-art performance on standard datasets while offering an interpretable feature vector and scalable method for ligand prioritization in early-stage drug discovery.
title A Morse Transform for Drug Discovery
topic Quantitative Methods
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.04507