Enhancing Structure-aware Protein Language Models with Efficient Fine-tuning for Various Protein Prediction Tasks

Proteins are crucial in a wide range of biological and engineering processes. Large protein language models (PLMs) can significantly advance our understanding and engineering of proteins. However, the effectiveness of PLMs in prediction and design is largely based on the representations derived from protein sequences. Without incorporating the three-dimensional structures of proteins, PLMs would overlook crucial aspects of how proteins interact with other molecules, thereby limiting their predictive accuracy. To address this issue, we present S-PLM, a 3D structure-aware PLM that employs multi-view contrastive learning to align protein sequences with their 3D structures in a unified latent space. Previously, we utilized a contact map-based approach to encode structural information, applying the Swin-Transformer to contact maps derived from AlphaFold-predicted protein structures. This work introduces a new approach that leverages a Geometric Vector Perceptron (GVP) model to process 3D coordinates and obtain structural embeddings. We focus on the application of structure-aware models for protein-related tasks by utilizing efficient fine-tuning methods to achieve optimal performance without significant computational costs. Our results show that S-PLM outperforms sequence-only PLMs across all protein clustering and classification tasks, achieving performance on par with state-of-the-art methods that require both sequence and structure inputs. S-PLM and its tuning tools are available at https://github.com/duolinwang/S-PLM/.