Dual-protein embedding-based graph model with dynamic attention for interaction prediction

Abstract

Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are fundamental to biological processes, yet experimental determination of PPIs remains costly and labor-intensive. While computational methods have emerged as promising alternatives, sequence-based approaches face critical challenges: (1) effectively capturing long-range dependencies and critical biochemical patterns in variable-length sequences, and (2) balancing computational efficiency with sensitivity to subtle residue-level interactions. Here, we present Dual Protein Embedding-based Graph Model (DPEG), which leverages dynamic graph attention networks to enable robust sequence-driven PPI prediction. Unlike structure-dependent methods, DPEG operates solely on sequence data, bypassing the need for structural or domain annotations. Specifically, we employ ESM-2 to transform sequences into residue-level graphs, preserving evolutionary and physicochemical context. To address variable sequence lengths, we design a module that can represent protein sequences of arbitrary lengths as graph networks at the amino acid level. Further, a gated attention mechanism is introduced to adaptively refining residue representations. Finally, a dynamic attention mechanism prioritizes functionally critical motifs within the graph. Evaluated on four diverse PPI datasets spanning different species and interaction types, DPEG achieves state-of-the-art performance and demonstrates strong cross-dataset generalizability. By integrating deep sequence semantics with graph-based interaction modeling, DPEG advances sequence-only PPI prediction, offering a scalable and biologically plausible framework for proteome-wide studies.