Unmasking AlphaFold: integration of experiments and predictions with a smarter template mechanism

Since the release of AlphaFold, researchers have actively refined its predictions and attempted to integrate it into existing pipelines for determining protein structures. These efforts have introduced a number of functionalities and results at the latest Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction edition (CASP15), resulting in a marked improvement in the prediction of multimeric protein structures. However, AlphaFolds capability of predicting large protein complexes is still limited and integrating experimental data in the prediction pipeline is not straightforward. In this study, we introduce AF_unmasked to overcome these limitations. Our results demonstrate that AF_unmasked can integrate experimental information to build larger or hard to predict protein assemblies with high confidence. The resulting predictions can help interpret and augment experimental data. This new approach generates near-perfect structures even when little to no evolutionary information is available and imperfect experimental structures are used as a starting point. AF_unmasked fills incomplete structures by a procedure called"structural inpainting", which may provide insights into protein dynamics. In summary, AF_unmasked provides an easy-to-use method that efficiently integrates experiments to predict large protein complexes more confidently. Codegithub.com/clami66/AF_unmasked