BConformeR: A Conformer Based on Mutual Sampling for Unified Prediction of Continuous and Discontinuous Antibody Binding Sites

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: You, Zhangyu, Ma, Jiahao, Li, Hongzong, Hu, Ye-Fan, Huang, Jian-Dong
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author You, Zhangyu
Ma, Jiahao
Li, Hongzong
Hu, Ye-Fan
Huang, Jian-Dong
author_facet You, Zhangyu
Ma, Jiahao
Li, Hongzong
Hu, Ye-Fan
Huang, Jian-Dong
contents Accurate prediction of antibody-binding sites (epitopes) on antigens is crucial for vaccine design, immunodiagnostics, therapeutic antibody development, antibody engineering, research into autoimmune and allergic diseases, and advancing our understanding of immune responses. Despite in silico methods that have been proposed to predict both linear (continuous) and conformational (discontinuous) epitopes, they consistently underperform in predicting conformational epitopes. In this work, we propose Conformer-based models trained separately on AlphaFold-predicted structures and experimentally determined structures, leveraging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract local features and Transformers to capture long-range dependencies within antigen sequences. Ablation studies demonstrate that CNN enhances the prediction of linear epitopes, and the Transformer module improves the prediction of conformational epitopes. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing baselines in terms of MCC, ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, and F1 scores on both linear and conformational epitopes.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2508_12029
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle BConformeR: A Conformer Based on Mutual Sampling for Unified Prediction of Continuous and Discontinuous Antibody Binding Sites
You, Zhangyu
Ma, Jiahao
Li, Hongzong
Hu, Ye-Fan
Huang, Jian-Dong
Biomolecules
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Machine Learning
J.3
Accurate prediction of antibody-binding sites (epitopes) on antigens is crucial for vaccine design, immunodiagnostics, therapeutic antibody development, antibody engineering, research into autoimmune and allergic diseases, and advancing our understanding of immune responses. Despite in silico methods that have been proposed to predict both linear (continuous) and conformational (discontinuous) epitopes, they consistently underperform in predicting conformational epitopes. In this work, we propose Conformer-based models trained separately on AlphaFold-predicted structures and experimentally determined structures, leveraging convolutional neural networks (CNNs) to extract local features and Transformers to capture long-range dependencies within antigen sequences. Ablation studies demonstrate that CNN enhances the prediction of linear epitopes, and the Transformer module improves the prediction of conformational epitopes. Experimental results show that our model outperforms existing baselines in terms of MCC, ROC-AUC, PR-AUC, and F1 scores on both linear and conformational epitopes.
title BConformeR: A Conformer Based on Mutual Sampling for Unified Prediction of Continuous and Discontinuous Antibody Binding Sites
topic Biomolecules
Artificial Intelligence
Computational Engineering, Finance, and Science
Machine Learning
J.3
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2508.12029