Explainable deep graph learning accurately modeling the peptide secondary structure prediction

Accurately predicting peptide secondary structures remains a challenging task due to the lack of discriminative information in short peptides. In this study, we propose PHAT, a deep graph learning framework for the prediction of peptide secondary structures. The framework includes a novel interpretable deep hypergraph multi-head attention network that uses residue-based reasoning for structure prediction. Our algorithm can incorporate sequential semantic information from large-scale biological corpus and structural semantic information from multi-scale structural segmentation, leading to better accuracy and interpretability even with extremely short peptides. Our interpretable models are able to highlight the reasoning of structural feature representations and the classification of secondary substructures. We further demonstrate the importance of secondary structures in peptide tertiary structure reconstruction and downstream functional analysis, highlighting the versatility of our models. To facilitate the use of our model, we establish an online server which is accessible via http://inner.wei-group.net/PHAT/. We expect our work to assist in the design of functional peptides and contribute to the advancement of structural biology research.