An end-to-end deep learning method for protein side-chain packing and inverse folding

Protein side-chain packing (PSCP), the task of determining amino acid side-chain conformations given only backbone atom positions, has important applications to protein structure prediction, refinement, and design. Many methods have been proposed to tackle this problem, but their speed or accuracy is still unsatisfactory. To address this, we present AttnPacker, a deep learning (DL) method for directly predicting protein side-chain coordinates. Unlike existing methods, AttnPacker directly incorporates backbone 3D geometry to simultaneously compute all side-chain coordinates without delegating to a discrete rotamer library or performing expensive conformational search and sampling steps. This enables a significant increase in computational efficiency, decreasing inference time by over 100× compared to the DL-based method DLPacker and physics-based RosettaPacker. Tested on the CASP13 and CASP14 native and nonnative protein backbones, AttnPacker computes physically realistic side-chain conformations, reducing steric clashes and improving both rmsd and dihedral accuracy compared to state-of-the-art methods SCWRL4, FASPR, RosettaPacker, and DLPacker. Different from traditional PSCP approaches, AttnPacker can also codesign sequences and side chains, producing designs with subnative Rosetta energy and high in silico consistency.