ProAttUnet: Protein Secondary-Structure Prediction Re-imagined via ESM2-Enhanced U-Net Dual-Fusion

Protein secondary structure prediction remains a pivotal concern within the domain of bioinformatics. In this innovative research, we introduce a novel methodology to further enhance a protein prediction model grounded in single sequences. Our key contribution lies in integrating the state-of-the-art (SOTA) model ESM2, which hails from the field of universal protein language models. By leveraging ESM2, we are able to acquire residual embeddings and contact maps for the protein sequences under study. Regarding the model architecture, we employ a unique dual-way U-Net framework for effective feature fusion. This framework is complemented by the integration of a cross-attention mechanism, enabling the model to capture more comprehensive context information. Furthermore, In accordance with the distinctive characteristics of protein sequences, we incorporate a so-called GCU_SE module into both the encoder and the decoder components of the model. These innovative enhancements enable the ProAttUnet model to outperform the benchmark model SPOT-1D-Single by 1.6%, 3.5%, 1.0%, 4.6%, and 7.2% for ss3, and by 5.5%, 7.8%, 4.1%, 8.1%, and 10.1% for ss8 across five test sets (SPOT-2016, SPOT-2016-HQ, SPOT-2018, SPOT-2018-HQ and TEST2018, respectively). This significant improvement vividly demonstrates the effectiveness and novelty of our proposed model.