Join Persistent Homology (JPH)-Based Machine Learning for Metalloprotein–Ligand Binding Affinity Prediction

With the crucial role of metalloproteins in respiration, oxidative stress protection, photosynthesis, and drug metabolism, the design and discovery of drugs that can target metalloproteins are extremely important. Recently, enormous potential has been shown by topological data analysis (TDA) and TDA-based machine learning models in various steps of drug design and discovery. Here, we propose, for the first time, join persistent homology (JPH) and JPH-based machine learning models for metalloprotein-ligand binding affinity prediction. Mathematically, dramatically different from persistent homology and extended persistent homology, our JPH employs a set of filtration functions to generate a multistage filtration for the join of the original simplicial complex and a specially designed test simplicial complex. From the featurization perspective, our JPH-based molecular descriptors can provide a more comprehensive characterization of the intrinsic topological information of the data. Our JPH descriptors are combined with the gradient boosting tree (GBT) model for metalloprotein-ligand binding affinity prediction. The benchmark dataset for metalloprotein-ligand complexes from PDBbind-v2020 is employed for the validation and comparison of our model. It has been found that our JPH-GBT model can outperform all of the existing models, as far as we know. This demonstrates the great potential of our join persistent homology in the characterization of molecular structures and functions.