Geometric Self-Supervised Pretraining on 3D Protein Structures using Subgraphs

Protein representation learning aims to learn informative protein embeddings capable of addressing crucial biological questions, such as protein function prediction. Although sequence-based transformer models have shown promising results by leveraging the vast amount of protein sequence data in a self-supervised way, there is still a gap in exploiting the available 3D protein structures. In this work, we propose a pre-training scheme going beyond trivial masking methods leveraging 3D and hierarchical structures of proteins. We propose a novel self-supervised method to pretrain 3D graph neural networks on 3D protein structures, by predicting the distances between local geometric centroids of protein subgraphs and the global geometric centroid of the protein. By considering subgraphs and their relationships to the global protein structure, our model can better learn the geometric properties of the protein structure. We experimentally show that our proposed pertaining strategy leads to significant improvements up to 6%, in the performance of 3D GNNs in various protein classification tasks. Our work opens new possibilities in unsupervised learning for protein graph models while eliminating the need for multiple views, augmentations, or masking strategies which are currently used so far.