Accurate Identification of Protein Binding Sites for All Drug Modalities Using ALLSites
Proteins interact with diverse molecular modalities, yet the incomplete identification of their binding sites has left the proteome-wide druggability largely underexplored. Although various computational methods have been developed for the prediction of protein binding sites, existing approaches are limited by their specificity to a single drug modality, dependence on high-quality structural data, or insufficient predictive accuracy. Here, a unified sequence-based framework, ALLSites, is constructed to identify proteome-wide binding sites across all drug modalities. Leveraging ESM-2 embeddings, ALLSites integrates a gated convolutional network with a transformer architecture to capture both global and local sequence features, effectively modeling residue interactions directly from sequence. This design bridges the gap between sequence-based and structure-based approaches, enabling ALLSites to achieve superior predictive performance across diverse drug modalities, including proteins, peptides, small molecules, carbohydrates, DNA, and RNA. It achieves state-of-the-art performance among sequence-based methods and matches the accuracy of the best structure-based tools. By enabling accurate and structure-free binding site prediction across all drug modalities, ALLSites is expected to expand the druggable proteome and provide a powerful resource for drug discovery.
Authors
- Mingxi Lu
- Xinyuan Yu (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7121-1353)
- GU Shukai
- Minjie Mou (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7619-2975)
- Zhimeng Zhou
- F B Li
- Yanlin Ren (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-1792-9601)
- Yang Zhang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0005-4503-9907)
- Haibin Dai
- Ziqi Pan
- Lingyan Zheng
- Yuan Zhou
- Hao Yang
- Feng Zhu
- Wei Hu
Institutions
- Hebei Medical University (CN)
- Children's Hospital of Zhejiang University (CN)
- Second Affiliated Hospital of Zhejiang University (CN)
- Zhejiang University (CN)
Publication Details
- Journal
- Advanced Science
- Published
- 2025-12-27
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.1002/advs.202516530
- Primary Topic
- Computational Drug Discovery Methods
- Type
- article
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00
Funders
- National Natural Science Foundation of China
- Zhejiang University