DeepPhosPPI: a deep learning framework with attention-CNN and transformer for predicting phosphorylation effects on protein-protein interactions.

Protein phosphorylation regulates protein function and cellular signaling pathways, and is strongly associated with diseases, including neurodegenerative disorders and cancer. Phosphorylation plays a critical role in regulating protein activity and cellular signaling by modulating protein-protein interactions (PPIs). It alters binding affinities and interaction networks, thereby influencing biological processes and maintaining cellular homeostasis. Experimental validation of these effects is labor-intensive and expensive, highlighting the need for efficient computational approaches. We propose DeepPhosPPI, the first sequence-based deep learning framework for phosphorylation effects on PPIs prediction, which employs the pre-trained protein language model for feature embedding, with ProtBERT and ESM-2 as alternative backbone encoders. By combining attention-based convolutional neural network and Transformer models, DeepPhosPPI accurately predicts phosphorylation effects. The experimental results show that DeepPhosPPI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in multiple tasks, including functional sites identification and regulatory effect classification.