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Deep generative models of genetic variation capture the effects of mutations

Abstract

The functions of proteins and RNAs are defined by the collective interactions of many residues, and yet most statistical models of biological sequences consider sites nearly independently. Recent approaches have demonstrated benefits of including interactions to capture pairwise covariation, but leave higher-order dependencies out of reach. Here we show how it is possible to capture higher-order, context-dependent constraints in biological sequences via latent variable models with nonlinear dependencies. We found that DeepSequence (https://github.com/debbiemarkslab/DeepSequence), a probabilistic model for sequence families, predicted the effects of mutations across a variety of deep mutational scanning experiments substantially better than existing methods based on the same evolutionary data. The model, learned in an unsupervised manner solely on the basis of sequence information, is grounded with biologically motivated priors, reveals the latent organization of sequence families, and can be used to explore new parts of sequence space.

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Fig. 1: A nonlinear latent-variable model captures higher-order dependencies in proteins and RNAs.
Fig. 2: Mutation effects can be quantified by likelihood ratios.
Fig. 3: A deep latent-variable model predicts the effects of mutations better than site-independent or pairwise models.
Fig. 4: Latent variables capture the organization of sequence space.
Fig. 5: Structured priors over weights capture biological assumptions.
Fig. 6: Interpretation of model and effect predictions.

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Data availability

The sequence data and code supporting this work are available at https://github.com/debbiemarkslab/DeepSequence. The mutation-effects data from all analyzed experiments, as well as all model predictions, are available in Supplementary Table 2.

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Acknowledgements

We thank C. Sander, F. Poelwijk, D. Duvenaud, S. Sinai, E. Kelsic, the Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Sequence-Function Relationship Journal Club and members of the Marks lab for helpful comments and discussions. A.J.R. is supported by DOE CSGF fellowship DE-FG02-97ER25308. D.S.M. and J.B.I. were funded by NIGMS (R01GM106303).

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A.J.R., J.B.I., and D.S.M. designed the study. A.J.R. and J.B.I. performed the computations. All authors wrote the paper.

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Correspondence to Debora S. Marks.

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Integrated supplementary information

Supplementary Figure 1

Distribution of experimental mutation effects and predictions made by DeepSequence.

Supplementary Figure 2 Mutation-effect predictions from generative models can be generalized to unseen sequences.

(above) Spearman ρ of mutation effect prediction of β-lactamase7 of each of the three generative models (N = 4788). Sequences with a normalized hamming distance greater than 0.53, 0.6, 0.8, and 0.95 with respect to the reference sequence are removed from the alignment before model fitting and inference. The distribution of hamming distances of the alignment and the cutoff of inclusion into each alignment is shown below.

Supplementary Figure 3 Predictions from all generative models for sequence families exhibited biases when compared to experimental data.

By transforming all model predictions and mutations to normalized ranks, we can compare effect predictions to experimental data across all biological datasets and models. The site-independent, pairwise, and latent variable models systematically over and under predict the effects of mutations according to amino acid identity. These biases vary in magnitude and direction depending on the amino acid identity before mutation (wildtype) or the residue identity it is mutated to (mutant).

Supplementary Figure 4 Supervised calibration of mutation-effect predictions improves predictive performance.

Amino acid bias was corrected with linear regression for all generative models, leaving one protein out for test and training a model on the rest (Methods). The bottom of the bar is Spearman ρ before correction, while the top is Spearman ρ after correction. Predictions without any evolutionary information (Supervised) performed considerably worse than other predictors.

Supplementary Figure 5 Differential improvement was strongest for deleterious effects.

Top five positions with largest reduction in rank error from independent model to DeepSequence for eight proteins are shown on the crystal structure of the protein.

Supplementary information

Supplementary Text and Figures

Supplementary Figures 1–5

Reporting Summary

Supplementary Table 1

Identification of sequences and datasets analyzed

Supplementary Table 2

Experimental and computed mutation effects

Supplementary Table 3

Correlation of DeepSequence and other evolutionary models to mutation effects

Supplementary Table 4

Statistical comparison to other mutation-effect prediction algorithms

Supplementary Table 5

Biologically motivated priors and Bayesian learning improve model performance

Supplementary Table 6

Dictionary parameters from all protein models

Supplementary Table 7

Group sparsity prior log enrichment statistics

Supplementary Table 8

PDB files used for scale parameter analysis

Supplementary Table 9

Residual analysis of effect predictions

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Riesselman, A.J., Ingraham, J.B. & Marks, D.S. Deep generative models of genetic variation capture the effects of mutations. Nat Methods 15, 816–822 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-018-0138-4

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