Topological machine learning for protein–nucleic acid binding affinity changes upon mutation

Understanding how protein mutations affect protein–nucleic acid binding is critical for unraveling disease mechanisms and advancing therapies. Current experimental approaches are laborious, and computational methods remain limited in accuracy. To address this challenge, we propose a novel topological machine learning model (TopoML) combining persistent Laplacian (from topological data analysis) with multi-perspective features: physicochemical properties, topological structures, and protein Transformer-derived sequence embeddings. This integrative framework captures robust representations of protein–nucleic acid binding interactions. To validate the proposed method, we employ two datasets, a protein–DNA dataset with 596 single-point amino acid mutations, and a protein–RNA dataset with 710 single-point amino acid mutations. We show that the proposed TopoML model outperforms state-of-the-art methods in predicting mutation-induced binding affinity changes for protein–DNA and protein–RNA complexes.

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