Saved in:
Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Pan, Tom, Dramko, Evan, Miller, Mitchell D., Kyrillidis, Anastasios, Phillips Jr, George N.
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
Subjects:
Online Access:https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10440
Tags: Add Tag
No Tags, Be the first to tag this record!
_version_ 1866915615731613696
author Pan, Tom
Dramko, Evan
Miller, Mitchell D.
Kyrillidis, Anastasios
Phillips Jr, George N.
author_facet Pan, Tom
Dramko, Evan
Miller, Mitchell D.
Kyrillidis, Anastasios
Phillips Jr, George N.
contents Protein structure determination has long been one of the primary challenges of structural biology, to which deep machine learning (ML)-based approaches have increasingly been applied. However, these ML models generally do not incorporate the experimental measurements directly, such as X-ray crystallographic diffraction data. To this end, we explore an approach that more tightly couples these traditional crystallographic and recent ML-based methods, by training a hybrid 3-d vision transformer and convolutional network on inputs from both domains. We make use of two distinct input constructs / Patterson maps, which are directly obtainable from crystallographic data, and ``partial structure'' template maps derived from predicted structures deposited in the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database with subsequently omitted residues. With these, we predict electron density maps that are then post-processed into atomic models through standard crystallographic refinement processes. Introducing an initial dataset of small protein fragments taken from Protein Data Bank entries and placing them in hypothetical crystal settings, we demonstrate that our method is effective at both improving the phases of the crystallographic structure factors and completing the regions missing from partial structure templates, as well as improving the agreement of the electron density maps with the ground truth atomic structures.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2511_10440
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Completion of partial structures using Patterson maps with the CrysFormer machine learning model
Pan, Tom
Dramko, Evan
Miller, Mitchell D.
Kyrillidis, Anastasios
Phillips Jr, George N.
Biological Physics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
Protein structure determination has long been one of the primary challenges of structural biology, to which deep machine learning (ML)-based approaches have increasingly been applied. However, these ML models generally do not incorporate the experimental measurements directly, such as X-ray crystallographic diffraction data. To this end, we explore an approach that more tightly couples these traditional crystallographic and recent ML-based methods, by training a hybrid 3-d vision transformer and convolutional network on inputs from both domains. We make use of two distinct input constructs / Patterson maps, which are directly obtainable from crystallographic data, and ``partial structure'' template maps derived from predicted structures deposited in the AlphaFold Protein Structure Database with subsequently omitted residues. With these, we predict electron density maps that are then post-processed into atomic models through standard crystallographic refinement processes. Introducing an initial dataset of small protein fragments taken from Protein Data Bank entries and placing them in hypothetical crystal settings, we demonstrate that our method is effective at both improving the phases of the crystallographic structure factors and completing the regions missing from partial structure templates, as well as improving the agreement of the electron density maps with the ground truth atomic structures.
title Completion of partial structures using Patterson maps with the CrysFormer machine learning model
topic Biological Physics
Artificial Intelligence
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2511.10440