Benchmarking all-atom biomolecular structure prediction with FoldBench

Accurate prediction of biomolecular complex structures is fundamental for understanding biological processes and rational therapeutic design. Recent advances in deep learning methods, particularly all-atom structure prediction models, have significantly expanded their capabilities to include diverse biomolecular entities, such as proteins, nucleic acids, ligands, and ions. However, comprehensive benchmarks covering multiple interaction types and molecular diversity remain scarce, limiting fair and rigorous assessment of model performance and generalizability. To address this gap, we introduce FoldBench, an extensive benchmark dataset consisting of 1522 biological assemblies categorized into nine distinct prediction tasks. Our evaluations reveal critical performance dependencies, showing that ligand docking accuracy notably diminishes as ligand similarity to the training set decreases, a pattern similarly observed in protein-protein interaction modeling. Furthermore, antibody-antigen predictions remain particularly challenging, with current methods exhibiting failure rates exceeding 50%. Among evaluated models, AlphaFold 3 consistently demonstrates superior accuracy across the majority of tasks. In summary, our results highlight significant advancements yet reveal persistent limitations within the field, providing crucial insights and benchmarks to inform future model development and refinement.

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Publication Details

Journal
Nature Communications
Published
2025-12-04
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-025-67127-3
Citations
6
Primary Topic
Protein Structure and Dynamics
Type
article
Field-Weighted Citation Impact
4.84
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article

Benchmarking all-atom biomolecular structure prediction with FoldBench

Qili Feng, Siqi Sun, Shuangjia Zheng, Sheng Xu et al.
6 citations
Nature Communications
Protein Structure and Dynamics
4.84
article

Benchmarking all-atom biomolecular structure prediction with FoldBench

Qili Feng, Siqi Sun, Shuangjia Zheng, Sheng Xu, Yu Cheng, Hao Wu, Lifeng Qiao, Tao Shen
article en
6 citations

Abstract

Accurate prediction of biomolecular complex structures is fundamental for understanding biological processes and rational therapeutic design. Recent advances in deep learning methods, particularly all-atom structure prediction models, have significantly expanded their capabilities to include diverse biomolecular entities, such as proteins, nucleic acids, ligands, and ions. However, comprehensive benchmarks covering multiple interaction types and molecular diversity remain scarce, limiting fair and rigorous assessment of model performance and generalizability. To address this gap, we introduce FoldBench, an extensive benchmark dataset consisting of 1522 biological assemblies categorized into nine distinct prediction tasks. Our evaluations reveal critical performance dependencies, showing that ligand docking accuracy notably diminishes as ligand similarity to the training set decreases, a pattern similarly observed in protein-protein interaction modeling. Furthermore, antibody-antigen predictions remain particularly challenging, with current methods exhibiting failure rates exceeding 50%. Among evaluated models, AlphaFold 3 consistently demonstrates superior accuracy across the majority of tasks. In summary, our results highlight significant advancements yet reveal persistent limitations within the field, providing crucial insights and benchmarks to inform future model development and refinement.

Nature CommunicationsVol. 17(1)
Tongji University (CN), Chinese University of Hong Kong (HK), Shanghai Jiao Tong University (CN), Fudan University (CN), Beijing Academy of Artificial Intelligence (CN), Shanghai Chengtou (China) (CN), Shanghai Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (CN)
Openalex Percentile: Top 5%
Protein Structure and Dynamics
4.84
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