PRIMRose: Insights into the Per-Residue Energy Metrics of Proteins with Double InDel Mutations using Deep Learning

Abstract

Understanding how protein mutations affect protein structure is essential for advancements in computational biology and bioinformatics. We introduce PRIMRose, a novel approach that predicts energy values for each residue given a mutated protein sequence. Unlike previous models that assess global energy shifts, our method analyzes the localized energetic impact of double amino acid insertions or deletions (InDels) at the individual residue level, enabling residue-specific insights into structural and functional disruption. We implement a Convolutional Neural Network architecture to predict the energy changes of each residue in a protein mutation. We train our model on datasets constructed from nine proteins, grouped into three categories: one set with exhaustive double InDel mutations, another with approximately 145k randomly sampled double InDel mutations, and a third with approximately 80k randomly sampled double InDel mutations. Our model achieves high predictive accuracy across a range of energy metrics as calculated by the Rosetta molecular modeling suite and reveals localized patterns that influence model performance, such as solvent accessibility and secondary structure context. This per-residue analysis offers new insights into the mutational tolerance of specific regions within proteins and provides higher interpretable and biologically meaningful predictions of InDels' effects.