Title : ( A Novel Machine-Learning Based Method for Resolving Secondary Structure Topology in Medium-Resolution Cryo-EM Density Maps )
Authors: bahareh behkamal , Mohammad Parsa Etemadheravi , Ali Mahmoodjanloo , Amin Mansoori , Mahmoud Naghibzadeh , Kamal Al Nasr , Mohammad Reza Saberi ,Access to full-text not allowed by authors
Abstract
Medium-resolution cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) density maps preserve substantial information about protein secondary-structure organization; however, accurately recovering the topology and connectivity of α-helices and β-strands remains challenging due to noise, structural heterogeneity, and the intrinsic resolution limitations that obscure residue-level detail. Topology determination is a key intermediate step toward building atomic protein models from medium-resolution cryo-EM density maps. It requires identifying the correct correspondence and orientation between secondary-structure elements (SSEs), i.e., α-helices and β-strands, predicted from the amino-acid sequence and those detected in the three dimensional (3D) density map. Despite significant advances in cryo-EM reconstruction and molecular modelling, this correspondence problem remains a challenging task, particularly in the presence of noisy density maps and in large, topologically complex α/β proteins. To address this issue, we propose a fully automated, classification-based framework that infers protein secondary-structure topology directly from medium-resolution cryo-EM density maps. Specifically, we cast topology determination as a supervised classification problem in three-dimensional space, leveraging geometric learning on model-derived Cα coordinate representations to establish SSE correspondences, and a Dynamic Time Warping (DTW)-based procedure to resolve density-stick directionality. Validation on a benchmark of 38 proteins spanning both simulated and experimental cryo-EM maps and covering diverse fold classes (α, β, and α/β) demonstrates strong and consistent performance. Among the evaluated predictors, the Voronoi (1-NN) classifier achieves the highest average correspondence quality, with a mean F1-score of 96.82% across the full benchmark. The framework also scales to large, topologically dense targets containing up to 65 secondary-structure elements while preserving very fast correspondence inference (<3 ms), offering a substantial improvement over prior baselines in both accuracy and computational cost. Overall, the classification-driven strategy provides reliable SSE-to-density matching and, when coupled with DTW-based direction selection, yields stronger topology constraints that directly support model building and refinement from medium-resolution cryo-EM reconstructions, while remaining easy to integrate into existing structural interpretation pipelines.
Keywords
, cryo, electron microscopy; protein secondary structure; topology determination; medium resolution; modeling; classification; machine learning; classification@article{paperid:1107449,
author = {Behkamal, Bahareh and Etemadheravi, Mohammad Parsa and Mahmoodjanloo, Ali and Mansoori, Amin and Naghibzadeh, Mahmoud and Kamal Al Nasr and محمدرضا صابری},
title = {A Novel Machine-Learning Based Method for Resolving Secondary Structure Topology in Medium-Resolution Cryo-EM Density Maps},
journal = {International Journal of Molecular Sciences},
year = {2026},
volume = {27},
number = {10},
month = {May},
issn = {1422-0067},
pages = {4388--4388},
numpages = {0},
keywords = {cryo-electron microscopy; protein secondary structure; topology determination; medium resolution; modeling; classification; machine learning; classification},
}
%0 Journal Article
%T A Novel Machine-Learning Based Method for Resolving Secondary Structure Topology in Medium-Resolution Cryo-EM Density Maps
%A Behkamal, Bahareh
%A Etemadheravi, Mohammad Parsa
%A Mahmoodjanloo, Ali
%A Mansoori, Amin
%A Naghibzadeh, Mahmoud
%A Kamal Al Nasr
%A محمدرضا صابری
%J International Journal of Molecular Sciences
%@ 1422-0067
%D 2026
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