Organizations: College of Information Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110819, China · School of Computer Science and Engineering, Northeastern University, Shenyang 110819, China · Key Laboratory of Data Analytics and Optimization for Smart Industry, Ministry of Education, Northeastern University, Shenyang, 110819, China
Accurate identification of protein-nucleotide binding sites is fundamental to deciphering molecular mechanisms and accelerating drug discovery. However, current computational methods often struggle with suboptimal performance due to inadequate feature representation and rigid fusion mechanisms, which hinder the effective exploitation of cross-task information synergy. To bridge this gap, we propose MTGA-MGE, a framework that integrates a Multi-Task Genetic Algorithm with Multi-Granularity Encoding to enhance binding site prediction. Specifically, we develop a Multi-Granularity Encoding (MGE) network that synergizes multi-scale convolutions and self-attention mechanisms to distill discriminative signals from high-dimensional, redundant biological data. To overcome the constraints of static fusion, a genetic algorithm is employed to adaptively evolve task-specific fusion strategies, thereby effectively improving model generalization. Furthermore, to catalyze collaborative learning, we introduce an External-Neighborhood Mechanism (ENM) that leverages biological similarities to facilitate targeted information exchange across tasks. Extensive evaluations on fifteen nucleotide datasets demonstrate that MTGA-MGE not only establishes a new state-of-the-art in data-abundant, high-resource scenarios but also maintains a robust competitive edge in rare, low-resource regimes, presenting a highly adaptive scheme for decoding complex protein-ligand interactions in the post-genomic era.
Figures & tables
Fig. 1 : Schematic representation of protein–nucleotide interaction, further illustrating the action of a drug at the protein–nucleotide binding sites. The highlighted regions (orange/yellow) illustrate the binding residues distributed across the protein structure.
Fig. 2 : Framework of MTGA-MGE. The framework operates through three key components: I. Multi-Granularity Encoding, II. Multi-Task Genetic Algorithm, III. External-Neighborhood Mechanism. Finally, IV. Test Process illustrates the model inference phase.
Type
Training and Validation Set
Test Set
(Pos, Neg) a
Ratio b
(Pos, Neg) a
Ratio b
ATP
(4688, 183273)
2.55%
(1403, 84267)
1.66%
ADP
(5145, 210355)
2.44%
(1131, 68974)
1.64%
AMP
(2505, 100429)
2.49%
(240, 12958)
1.85%
GDP
(1523, 56859)
2.67%
(347, 16795)
2.06%
GTP
(1204, 50405)
2.38%
(462, 19723)
2.34%
TABLE I : Detailed statistics of the Nuc-1982 dataset distribution.
Hyperparameter
Setting
Stage I: Feature Extraction
Model Architecture
Input Dimension
2304 (ProtT5 + ESM2)
CNN Kernel Sizes
{1, 3, 7}
CNN Channel Dimensions
512 → 256 → 128
Transformer Heads
8
TABLE II : Hyperparameters used in MTGA-MGE
Nucleotide
Method
MCC
AUPRC
Sen (%)
Pre (%)
Acc (%)
Spe (%)
ATP
SXGBsite
0.343
0.377
52.49
24.62
96.16
96.98
EC-RUS
0.423
0.311
48.77
38.78
97.64
98.55
BGSVM-NUC
0.357
0.350
45.94
30.01
97.03
97.99
GHKNN
0.120
0.223
46.09
5.67
84.89
85.62
DeepATPseq
0.531
0.506
49.11
58.94
98.61
99.43
NucGMTL
0.570
0.552
55.38
60.10
98.66
99.38
TABLE III : Performance Comparison with State-of-the-Art Methods on Five High-resource Nucleotide Tasks
Fig. 3 : Radar plots comparing the performance of NucMTL (red), NucGMTL (blue), and MTGA-MGE (green) on ten low-resource nucleotide tasks. Panels (a)–(c) display the MCC, while panels (d)–(f) present the AUPRC. In each plot, the axes represent specific nucleotide tasks, with a larger enclosed area indicating superior predictive performance.
Fig. 4 : Visualization of protein-ADP binding site predictions. The protein structures are shown in gray cartoon representation. Red: True Positive (TP); Blue: False Negative (FN); Yellow: False Positive (FP).
Fig. 5 : Overall performances of MGE. (1) Performance comparison (MCC and AUPRC) of different convolutional encoder architectures across five high-resource nucleotide tasks. (2) t-SNE visualization comparing the residue representations learned (a) using raw PLM features alone and (b) using MGE. (3) t-SNE visualization comparing residue representations learned under different input configurations: (a) single-task GDP input and (b) joint GDP–ADP input. In all t-SNE plots, data points are colored by prediction outcome: true positive (TP, purple), false negative (FN, red), false positive (FP, blue), and true negative (TN, gray).
Fig. 6 : Overall performance of MTGA optimization and MTGA-MGE inference efficiency. (1) Performance comparison between Naive Mean Fusion (MGE-Avg) and GA (MTGA-MGE) on five high-resource nucleotide tasks. (2) Temporal evolution of interaction intensity for the GDP task across evolutionary generations. (3) Evolution of the Pareto front for the GDP task. The left panel shows the initial population with random scattering, and the right panel illustrates the final population converging toward a non-dominated front. (4) Comparison of inference efficiency between NucGMTL and MTGA-MGE on the ADP task across different batch sizes.
Nucleotide
Optimization Strategy
MCC
AUPRC
ADP
w/o-neighborhood
0.596
0.611
neighborhood
0.593
0.630
AMP
w/o-neighborhood
0.567
0.530
neighborhood
0.618
0.600
ATP
w/o-neighborhood
0.653
0.699
neighborhood
0.677
0.715
TABLE IV : Performance Comparison between With and Without the ENM on Five High-resource Nucleotides
Nucleotide
Method
MCC
AUPRC
ADP
SPEA2
0.610
0.603
NSGA-II
0.586
0.544
NSGA-III
0.684
0.674
AMP
SPEA2
0.681
0.646
NSGA-II
0.659
0.643
NSGA-III
0.684
0.648
TABLE V : Performance Comparison of Different Multi-Objective Optimization Strategies on Four Representative High-resource Nucleotide Tasks
Department of Artificial Intelligence, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India · Department of Computer Science, Indian Institute of Technology, Kharagpur, India
May 21, 2026·Zhaohan Meng, Zhen Bai, Ke Yuan +4Drug Discovery
School of Computing Science, University of Glasgow · School of Life Science and Technology, Institute of Science Tokyo · School of Cancer Sciences, University of Glasgow +4