bioRxiv preprint doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2019.12.20.884841; this version posted September 20, 2020. The copyright holder for this preprint (which was not certified by peer review) is the author/funder, who has granted bioRxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. It is made available under aCC-BY-ND 4.0 International license. SSnet: A Deep Learning Approach for Protein-Ligand Interaction Prediction Niraj Verma,y,x Xingming Qu,z,x Francesco Trozzi,y,x Mohamed Elsaied,{,x Nischal Karki,y,x Yunwen Tao,y,x Brian Zoltowski,y,x Eric C. Larson,z,x and Elfi Kraka∗,y,x yDepartment of Chemistry, Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX USA zDepartment of Computer Science, Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX USA {Department of Engineering Management and Information System, Southern Methodist University, Dallas TX USA xSouthern Methodist University E-mail:
[email protected] Abstract Computational prediction of Protein-Ligand Interaction (PLI) is an important step in the modern drug discovery pipeline as it mitigates the cost, time, and resources re- quired to screen novel therapeutics. Deep Neural Networks (DNN) have recently shown excellent performance in PLI prediction. However, the performance is highly dependent on protein and ligand features utilized for the DNN model. Moreover, in current mod- els, the deciphering of how protein features determine the underlying principles that govern PLI is not trivial. In this work, we developed a DNN framework named SSnet that utilizes secondary structure information of proteins extracted as the curvature and torsion of the protein backbone to predict PLI. We demonstrate the performance of SSnet by comparing against a variety of currently popular machine and non-machine learning models using various metrics.