Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are fundamental to understanding cellular processes and disease mechanisms. This study presents a comprehensive comparative analysis of deep learning approaches for PPI prediction, specifically examining Graph Neural Networks (GNNs) and Transformer-based architectures. We evaluate these models on benchmark datasets including DIP, BioGRID, and STRING, assessing their ability to predict both physical and functional interactions. Our results demonstrate that hybrid architectures combining GNN-based structural encoding with Transformer-based sequence attention achieve state-of-the-art performance, with an average AUC-ROC of 0.942 and AUC-PR of 0.891 across all benchmark datasets. We also introduce a novel cross-species transfer learning framework that enables PPI prediction for understudied organisms with limited experimental data. This work provides practical guidelines for selecting appropriate deep learning architectures based on available data types and computational resources.
Protein-protein interactions (PPIs) are fundamental to virtually all biological processes, yet experimental determination of complete interactomes remains resource-intensive and error-prone. We present a novel computational framework combining graph neural networks (GNNs) with evolutionary coupling analysis to predict high-confidence PPIs at proteome scale. Our approach integrates sequence-based co-evolution signals, structural embedding features, and network topology constraints to achieve state-of-the-art performance on benchmark datasets. Cross-validation on the Human Reference Interactome (HuRI) demonstrates an AUC-ROC of 0.94, representing a 12% improvement over existing deep learning methods. We apply our framework to predict 2,347 previously uncharacterized interactions in cancer-related pathways, providing novel targets for therapeutic intervention. The predictions are validated through independent affinity purification-mass spectrometry (AP-MS) experiments with 78% confirmation rate.
