ProtSCAPE: Mapping the landscape of protein conformations in molecular dynamics

Understanding the dynamic nature of protein structures is essential for comprehending their biological functions. While significant progress has been made in predicting static folded structures, modeling protein motions on microsecond to millisecond scales remains challenging. To address these challenges, we introduce a novel deep learning architecture, Protein Transformer with Scattering, Attention, and Positional Embedding (ProtSCAPE), which leverages the geometric scattering transform alongside transformer-based attention mechanisms to capture protein dynamics from molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. ProtSCAPE utilizes the multi-scale nature of the geometric scattering transform to extract features from protein structures conceptualized as graphs and integrates these features with dual attention structures that focus on residues and amino acid signals, generating latent representations of protein trajectories. Furthermore, ProtSCAPE incorporates regression heads to enforce temporally coherent latent representations and learn the energy landscape of protein conformations. Importantly, we demonstrate that ProtSCAPE generalizes effectively from short to long trajectories and from wild-type to mutant proteins, surpassing traditional approaches by delivering more precise and interpretable upsampling of dynamics.