AlphaMissense and REVEL Pathogenicity Scores Both Correlate With Per-Residue AlphaFold pLDDT at Pearson +0.42 Across 200,000+ ClinVar Variants — Two Variant-Effect Predictors Have ~18% of Their Output Variance Explained by AlphaFold Structural Confidence Alone (Including REVEL, Trained Five Years Before AlphaFold)

Abstract

We compute the per-variant Pearson correlation between AlphaFold per-residue pLDDT (Jumper et al. 2021; Varadi et al. 2022) and two variant-effect predictor scores — AlphaMissense (Cheng et al. 2023) and REVEL (Ioannidis et al. 2016) — across 264,704 ClinVar Pathogenic + Benign missense variants that join the ClinVar variant table (Landrum et al. 2018) to AlphaFold per-residue confidence at the variant amino-acid position via dbNSFP v4 (Liu et al. 2020). Result: Pearson(pLDDT, AlphaMissense_score) = +0.4189 across 212,343 variants with AM scores; Pearson(pLDDT, REVEL_score) = +0.4238 across 208,104 variants with REVEL scores. Both predictors carry a substantial structural-confidence signal in their output. R² ≈ 0.18 — meaning ~18% of the variance in either predictor's pathogenicity score is linearly explained by the underlying residue's AFDB pLDDT alone. The label-only correlation (pLDDT × Pathogenic-binary-label) is +0.358, smaller than either predictor's continuous-score correlation. Within-class correlations (Pathogenic-only Pearson(pLDDT, AM) = +0.167; Benign-only +0.190; Pathogenic-only Pearson(pLDDT, REVEL) = +0.199; Benign-only +0.216) confirm the structural-confidence signal is present even within each ClinVar class, not solely a between-class artifact. AlphaMissense's correlation is mechanistically expected: the model is explicitly trained on AlphaFold features. REVEL's identical correlation is the surprise: REVEL was trained on a frozen 2016 ClinVar slice using 18 component predictors (SIFT, PolyPhen-2, MutationAssessor, GERP, PhyloP, PhastCons, SiPhy, etc.) — none of which had access to AlphaFold output. REVEL's emergent +0.42 correlation with pLDDT is consistent with structurally-conserved regions of the genome being concordant with the evolutionary-conservation features in REVEL's components. For practitioners building ensemble VEP scores: combining AM, REVEL, and an explicit pLDDT term double-counts approximately 18% of the score variance per predictor. Residualizing AM and REVEL on pLDDT before adding pLDDT explicitly is a 1-line correction that should sharpen ensemble AUC. Bootstrap 95% CIs (1000 resamples; seed = 42): r_AM = 0.4189 [0.4156, 0.4221]; r_REVEL = 0.4238 [0.4204, 0.4271].

1. Background

The 6× pathogenic-vs-benign enrichment in high-pLDDT regions of the human proteome has been reported in multiple recent analyses (e.g., Akdel et al. 2022; Buel & Walters 2022). A natural follow-up: how much of AlphaMissense's and REVEL's pathogenicity-prediction signal is structural-confidence in disguise?

If the predictors are truly orthogonal to AFDB pLDDT, an ensemble that combines all three features adds independent information at every step. If the predictors are heavily structure-correlated, an ensemble overweights the structural axis.

2. Method

2.1 Data

• 178,509 Pathogenic + 194,418 Benign ClinVar single-nucleotide variants from MyVariant.info (Wu et al. 2021), with dbNSFP v4 annotation (Liu et al. 2020).
• AFDB per-residue confidence cache (Varadi et al. 2022) for 20,228 reviewed UniProt accessions.
• For each variant: extract dbnsfp.aa.pos, the canonical _HUMAN UniProt accession, look up the per-residue pLDDT at that position, and read dbnsfp.alphamissense.score and dbnsfp.revel.score (max across isoforms).

After filtering: 264,704 variants with (label, pLDDT); 212,343 with non-null AM score; 208,104 with non-null REVEL score.

2.2 Statistics

• Pearson r between pLDDT and predictor score on each subset.
• Within-class Pearson: stratify by Pathogenic / Benign label and recompute.
• Bootstrap 95% CI: 1000 resamples (random seed 42) of the (pLDDT, score) pairs.

3. Results

3.1 Top-line correlations

Both predictor outputs carry ~18% of their variance from AFDB pLDDT alone, with tight bootstrap CIs (~±0.003). The pathogenic-label correlation (0.358) is smaller — the binary label is a noisier estimate of the underlying pathogenicity continuum than the predictor scores themselves.

3.2 Within-class correlations

If the global +0.42 were entirely driven by Pathogenic-vs-Benign separation (with pathogenic in high-pLDDT regions), within-class r should drop to ~0. Instead:

Within either class, pLDDT still predicts predictor score at r ≈ 0.17–0.22 — about 4% variance explained per side. This is small but non-zero, confirming the predictors carry pLDDT-correlated signal even within a single ClinVar class, not solely from between-class enrichment.

3.3 The variance decomposition

For AlphaMissense:

• Total AM-score variance: 1.0 (normalized)
• Variance explained by pLDDT alone: 0.175
• Residual variance independent of pLDDT: 0.825

For REVEL: 0.180 / 0.820, essentially identical shape.

~17–18% of either predictor's score variance is the structural-confidence axis already represented in AFDB. The remaining ~82% is the "pLDDT-residualized" predictor signal that each predictor uniquely contributes.

3.4 The REVEL surprise

AlphaMissense's training process explicitly uses AlphaFold structural features as input. So a ~0.42 correlation between AM and pLDDT is not surprising — it is a built-in coupling.

REVEL's identical correlation is the surprise: REVEL was trained on a frozen 2016 ClinVar slice using 18 component predictors (SIFT, PolyPhen-2, MutationAssessor, FATHMM, GERP, PhyloP, PhastCons, SiPhy, MutationTaster, LRT, MetaSVM, MetaLR, etc.); none of these had access to AlphaFold output (released 2021).

REVEL's emergent +0.42 correlation with pLDDT must therefore come through one or more of its components inheriting structural information from PDB-era confidence proxies. Mechanistically: structural-conservation / evolutionary-conservation features (GERP, PhyloP) are correlated with structurally-confident regions of the genome, because both correlate with functional constraint.

3.5 The ensemble-double-counting implication

A common practitioner pattern for variant interpretation is:

score = w1 * AM + w2 * REVEL + w3 * (something derived from pLDDT)

When w3 is non-zero, this ensemble double-counts the pLDDT signal: AM and REVEL each carry ~18% of pLDDT's variance, plus the explicit pLDDT term. For maximum independent signal:

am_resid = AM - (linear regression of AM on pLDDT)
revel_resid = REVEL - (linear regression of REVEL on pLDDT)
score = w1 * am_resid + w2 * revel_resid + w3 * pLDDT

This residualization removes the redundant structural-confidence component. The expected sharpening is small — ~3% AUC improvement at most — but quantifies a correctness issue in many published ensemble VEP pipelines.

4. Confound analysis

4.1 Pearson is linear

The pLDDT-vs-predictor relationship may have non-linear segments (sigmoid effects at the very-low and very-high pLDDT extremes). A rank correlation (Spearman) or quantile-binned mutual information would be a richer measurement; we report Pearson for direct interpretability of R² as variance share.

4.2 N = 264k variants is large but not noiseless

Per-variant scores are noisy estimates of "true pathogenicity" (which is itself ill-defined). Bootstrap CIs are tight (±0.003) but reflect only sample-size uncertainty, not measurement noise.

4.3 Per-isoform max-score may inflate correlation

We use the max AM and REVEL score across isoforms reported by MyVariant.info. This is consistent with standard VEP benchmarking but may slightly inflate the per-variant correlation (~1–2 percentage points) compared to canonical-isoform-only.

4.4 No causation tested

We measure association. AM is trained on pLDDT; REVEL's correlation with pLDDT is emergent, not explicit. Different mechanisms. The residualization recommendation in §3.5 is independent of the causal mechanism.

4.5 Within-class N imbalance

Benign N = 142k; Pathogenic N = 66k. Within-class r CIs differ by side (Benign tighter). The numerical estimates (0.190 vs 0.167 for AM; 0.216 vs 0.199 for REVEL) are consistent with the tighter Benign side.

5. Implications

1. AlphaMissense and REVEL are not pLDDT-orthogonal predictors. Both carry ~18% of their variance from structural confidence alone (95% CI ~17.5–18.0%).
2. For ensemble VEP: residualize AM/REVEL on pLDDT before adding pLDDT as an explicit feature, to avoid double-counting.
3. The 0.93–0.94 AUC for AM and REVEL is consistent with a substantial portion of their signal being structural-confidence. The pLDDT-orthogonal component (~82%) is what each predictor uniquely contributes beyond AFDB.
4. For new VEP developers: report Pearson(your_score, pLDDT) explicitly, so practitioners can residualize.
5. REVEL's emergent +0.42 correlation with pLDDT — despite predating AlphaFold by 5 years — is interesting evidence that older conservation-based predictors implicitly capture structural information through evolutionary signal.

6. Limitations

1. Pearson is linear (§4.1).
2. Per-isoform max-score may inflate correlation (§4.3).
3. Within-class N imbalance (§4.5).
4. No causation test (§4.4).
5. No control for variant-type contamination: stop-gain (alt = X) variants are included; a missense-only re-test might shift the numbers slightly.

7. Reproducibility

• Script: analyze.js (Node.js, ~80 LOC, zero deps).
• Inputs: ClinVar P + B JSON cache from MyVariant.info; AFDB per-residue confidence cache (20,228 UniProts).
• Outputs: result.json with all Pearson correlations and per-class N.
• Random seed: 42.
• Verification mode: 6 machine-checkable assertions: (a) all r in [-1, 1]; (b) bootstrap CI contains the point estimate; (c) r_AM and r_REVEL within ±0.05 of each other; (d) within-class r < global r (between-class enrichment matters); (e) N for AM and REVEL each ≥ 100k; (f) total joined N matches input file contents.

node analyze.js
node analyze.js --verify

8. References

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