Z

Zhifeng Gao

National University of Defense Technology

ORCID: 0000-0001-8433-999X

Publishes on Machine Learning in Materials Science, Computational Drug Discovery Methods, Protein Structure and Dynamics. 51 papers and 665 citations.

51Publications
665Total Citations

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Top publicationsby citations

Uni-Mol: A Universal 3D Molecular Representation Learning Framework
Gengmo Zhou, Zhifeng Gao, Qiankun Ding et al.|ChemRxiv|2023
Cited by 267Open Access

Molecular representation learning (MRL) has gained tremendous attention due to its critical role in learning from limited supervised data for applications like drug design. In most MRL methods, molecules are treated as 1D sequential tokens or 2D topology graphs, limiting their ability to incorporate 3D information for downstream tasks and, in particular, making it almost impossible for 3D geometry prediction/generation. In this paper, we propose a universal 3D MRL framework, called Uni-Mol, that significantly enlarges the representation ability and application scope of MRL schemes. Uni-Mol contains two pretrained models with the same SE(3) Transformer architecture: a molecular model pretrained by 209M molecular conformations; a pocket model pretrained by 3M candidate protein pocket data. Besides, Uni-Mol contains several finetuning strategies to apply the pretrained models to various downstream tasks. By properly incorporating 3D information, Uni-Mol outperforms SOTA in 14/15 molecular property prediction tasks. Moreover, Uni-Mol achieves superior performance in 3D spatial tasks, including protein-ligand binding pose prediction, molecular conformation generation, etc. The code, model, and data are made publicly available at https://github.com/dptech-corp/Uni-Mol.

A comprehensive transformer-based approach for high-accuracy gas adsorption predictions in metal-organic frameworks
Jingqi Wang, Jiapeng Liu, Hongshuai Wang et al.|Nature Communications|2024
Cited by 96Open Access

Gas separation is crucial for industrial production and environmental protection, with metal-organic frameworks (MOFs) offering a promising solution due to their tunable structural properties and chemical compositions. Traditional simulation approaches, such as molecular dynamics, are complex and computationally demanding. Although feature engineering-based machine learning methods perform better, they are susceptible to overfitting because of limited labeled data. Furthermore, these methods are typically designed for single tasks, such as predicting gas adsorption capacity under specific conditions, which restricts the utilization of comprehensive datasets including all adsorption capacities. To address these challenges, we propose Uni-MOF, an innovative framework for large-scale, three-dimensional MOF representation learning, designed for multi-purpose gas prediction. Specifically, Uni-MOF serves as a versatile gas adsorption estimator for MOF materials, employing pure three-dimensional representations learned from over 631,000 collected MOF and COF structures. Our experimental results show that Uni-MOF can automatically extract structural representations and predict adsorption capacities under various operating conditions using a single model. For simulated data, Uni-MOF exhibits remarkably high predictive accuracy across all datasets. Additionally, the values predicted by Uni-MOF correspond with the outcomes of adsorption experiments. Furthermore, Uni-MOF demonstrates considerable potential for broad applicability in predicting a wide array of other properties.

Uni-Mol: A Universal 3D Molecular Representation Learning Framework
Gengmo Zhou, Zhifeng Gao, Qiankun Ding et al.|ChemRxiv|2022
Cited by 81Open Access

Molecular representation learning (MRL) has gained tremendous attention due to its critical role in learning from limited supervised data for applications like drug design. In most MRL methods, molecules are treated as 1D sequential tokens or 2D topology graphs, limiting their ability to incorporate 3D information for downstream tasks and, in particular, making it almost impossible for 3D geometry prediction or generation. Herein, we propose Uni-Mol, a universal MRL framework that significantly enlarges the representation ability and application scope of MRL schemes. Uni-Mol is composed of two models with the same SE(3)-equivariant transformer architecture: a molecular pretraining model trained by 209M molecular conformations; a pocket pretraining model trained by 3M candidate protein pocket data. The two models are used independently for separate tasks, and are combined when used in protein-ligand binding tasks. By properly incorporating 3D information, Uni-Mol outperforms SOTA in 14/15 molecular property prediction tasks. Moreover, Uni-Mol achieves superior performance in 3D spatial tasks, including protein-ligand binding pose prediction, molecular conformation generation, etc. Finally, we show that Uni-Mol can be successfully applied to the tasks with few-shot data like pocket druggability prediction. The model and data will be made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/dptech-corp/Uni-Mol}

Data-driven quantum chemical property prediction leveraging 3D conformations with Uni-Mol+
Shuqi Lu, Zhifeng Gao, Di He et al.|Nature Communications|2024
Cited by 45Open Access

Quantum chemical (QC) property prediction is crucial for computational materials and drug design, but relies on expensive electronic structure calculations like density functional theory (DFT). Recent deep learning methods accelerate this process using 1D SMILES or 2D graphs as inputs but struggle to achieve high accuracy as most QC properties depend on refined 3D molecular equilibrium conformations. We introduce Uni-Mol+, a deep learning approach that leverages 3D conformations for accurate QC property prediction. Uni-Mol+ first generates a raw 3D conformation using RDKit then iteratively refines it towards DFT equilibrium conformation using neural networks, which is finally used to predict the QC properties. To effectively learn this conformation update process, we introduce a two-track Transformer model backbone and a novel training approach. Our benchmarking results demonstrate that the proposed Uni-Mol+ significantly improves the accuracy of QC property prediction in various datasets.

Uni-Mol: A Universal 3D Molecular Representation Learning Framework
Gengmo Zhou, Zhifeng Gao, Qiankun Ding et al.|ChemRxiv|2022
Cited by 39Open Access

Molecular representation learning (MRL) has gained tremendous attention due to its critical role in learning from limited supervised data for applications like drug design. In most MRL methods, molecules are treated as 1D sequential tokens or 2D topology graphs, limiting their ability to incorporate 3D information for downstream tasks and, in particular, making it almost impossible for 3D geometry prediction or generation. Herein, we propose Uni-Mol, a universal MRL framework that significantly enlarges the representation ability and application scope of MRL schemes. Uni-Mol is composed of two models with the same SE(3)-equivariant transformer architecture: a molecular pretraining model trained by 209M molecular conformations; a pocket pretraining model trained by 3M candidate protein pocket data. The two models are used independently for separate tasks, and are combined when used in protein-ligand binding tasks. By properly incorporating 3D information, Uni-Mol outperforms SOTA in 14/15 molecular property prediction tasks. Moreover, Uni-Mol achieves superior performance in 3D spatial tasks, including protein-ligand binding pose prediction, molecular conformation generation, etc. Finally, we show that Uni-Mol can be successfully applied to the tasks with few-shot data like pocket druggability prediction. The code, model, and data are made publicly available at \url{https://github.com/dptech-corp/Uni-Mol}.