Back

A generalisable framework to inject distance information into Alphafold-like structure predictors

Mirabello, C.; Wallner, B.; Orekhov, V.; Nystedt, B.; Pearce, N.

2026-07-06 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.07.02.736010 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Structure prediction methods are now highly successful at predicting three-dimensional structures from sequence. However, it is still often desirable to supplement these methods with additional external priors on pairwise distances in the structures. We present a general method for injecting prior information into AlphaFold-like structure predictors by biasing the pair representation to produce desirable features in the distogram, which are then reflected in the structures. We demonstrate this approach to: sample alternate states by selectively pushing or pulling mobile amino acid pairs; integrate NMR NOESY data with structure pre-diction; and improve the success of protein-protein and protein-ligand complex prediction. We demonstrate that this approach is applicable both to AlphaFold2 and a reproduction of AlphaFold 3 (OpenFold3). resTrain is open source, available to all users on GitHub and as a Colab notebook: https://github.com/clami66/resTrain

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

1
Bioinformatics
1204 papers in training set
Top 1%
18.1%
2
Nature Communications
5641 papers in training set
Top 16%
11.6%
3
Nature Methods
385 papers in training set
Top 1%
7.7%
4
Protein Science
246 papers in training set
Top 0.6%
6.1%
5
PLOS Computational Biology
1863 papers in training set
Top 7%
5.4%
6
Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling
238 papers in training set
Top 1%
4.7%
50% of probability mass above
7
Nucleic Acids Research
1281 papers in training set
Top 5%
3.4%
8
eLife
5828 papers in training set
Top 32%
3.4%
9
Structure
193 papers in training set
Top 0.8%
3.2%
10
Bioinformatics Advances
203 papers in training set
Top 2%
2.4%
11
Proteins: Structure, Function, and Bioinformatics
88 papers in training set
Top 0.6%
2.1%
12
Journal of Structural Biology
64 papers in training set
Top 0.4%
1.9%
13
Molecular Biology and Evolution
542 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.7%
14
Communications Biology
993 papers in training set
Top 15%
1.7%
15
PLOS ONE
5266 papers in training set
Top 50%
1.6%
16
Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences
2444 papers in training set
Top 31%
1.5%
17
Cell Systems
201 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.4%
18
Biophysical Journal
631 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.3%
19
Journal of Molecular Biology
232 papers in training set
Top 3%
1.1%
20
Scientific Reports
3612 papers in training set
Top 67%
1.1%
21
Journal of Cheminformatics
29 papers in training set
Top 0.6%
1.0%
22
Briefings in Bioinformatics
354 papers in training set
Top 6%
1.0%
23
Nature
645 papers in training set
Top 9%
1.0%
24
Journal of Chemical Theory and Computation
140 papers in training set
Top 1.0%
1.0%
25
NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics
242 papers in training set
Top 5%
0.8%
26
BMC Bioinformatics
457 papers in training set
Top 6%
0.8%
27
Nature Biotechnology
172 papers in training set
Top 5%
0.6%
28
PeerJ
308 papers in training set
Top 13%
0.6%
29
Communications Chemistry
48 papers in training set
Top 2%
0.6%
30
Nature Machine Intelligence
70 papers in training set
Top 3%
0.6%