Abstract
Virtual screening (VS) is a critical technique in understanding biomolecular interactions, particularly in drug design and discovery. However, the accuracy of current VS models heavily relies on three-dimensional (3D) structures obtained through molecular docking, which is often unreliable due to the low accuracy. To address this issue, we introduce a sequence-based virtual screening (SVS) as another generation of VS models that utilize advanced natural language processing (NLP) algorithms and optimized deep K-embedding strategies to encode biomolecular interactions without relying on 3D structure-based docking. We demonstrate that SVS outperforms state-of-the-art performance for four regression datasets involving protein-ligand binding, protein-protein, protein-nucleic acid binding, and ligand inhibition of protein-protein interactions and five classification datasets for protein-protein interactions in five biological species. SVS has the potential to transform current practices in drug discovery and protein engineering.