Enhancing mutation impact prediction in protein-protein interactions through interpretable graph-based multi-level feature interactions.

motivationProtein-protein interactions (PPIs) are central to cellular functions, and predicting mutation-induced changes in binding affinity (ΔΔG) remains challenging. Although existing computational methods integrate sequence- and structure-derived features and thus implicitly capture certain sequence-structure relationships, they typically fuse these modalities through simple concatenation, without explicitly modeling their multidimensional and multiscale interdependencies.

resultsHere, we introduce IGMI, an interpretable graph-based model that explicitly encodes multi-level feature interactions across 1D sequences, 2D contact maps, 3D structures, and residue- and atom-level representations. By recalibrating cross-dimensional and cross-scale dependencies, IGMI enables more accurate estimation of both local and long-range mutation effects. Across multiple benchmark datasets, IGMI consistently outperforms state-of-the-art methods in accuracy, robustness, and interpretability. Macro- and micro-level analyses further reveal biologically plausible patterns, distinguishing direct interface perturbations from indirect structural reorganizations. Complementary analyses under different data splitting strategies indicate that the model learns generalizable affinity-related interaction patterns, rather than relying on split-specific information. IGMI provides a reliable and interpretable framework for modeling mutation-induced affinity changes, supporting applications in protein engineering and therapeutic design. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: IGMI is implemented in PyTorch and released under an open-source license. The full codebase, training scripts, and evaluation utilities are available at https://github.com/ShiweiWu-545/IGMI.git. An archival snapshot containing all source code, pre-trained weights, processed datasets, and reproducibility scripts is available on Zenodo (https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.17563574). CONTACT: fengweixing@hrbeu.edu.cn; yulei@nbic.ecnu.edu.cn; zhaochengkui@hrbeu.edu.cn. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.