Machine learning for <i>in silico</i> protein research

Abstract

<i>In silico</i> protein calculation has been an important research subject for a long time, while its recent combination with machine learning promotes the development greatly in related areas. This review focuses on four major fields of the <i>in silico</i> protein research that combines with machine learning, which are molecular dynamics, structure prediction, property prediction and molecule design. Molecular dynamics depend on the parameters of force field, which is necessary for obtaining accurate results. Machine learning can help researchers to obtain more accurate force field parameters. In molecular dynamics simulation, machine learning can also help to perform the free energy calculation in relatively low cost. Structure prediction is generally used to predict the structure given a protein sequence. Structure prediction is of high complexity and data volume, which is exactly what machine learning is good at. By the help of machine learning, scientists have gained great achievements in three-dimensional structure prediction of proteins. On the other hand, the predicting of protein properties based on its known information is also important to study protein. More challenging, however, is molecule design. Though marching learning has made breakthroughs in drug-like small molecule design and protein design in recent years, there is still plenty of room for exploration. This review focuses on summarizing the above four fields andlooks forward to the application of marching learning to the <i>in silico</i> protein research.