metapredict: A machine learning-based tool for predicting protein disorder.

Last updated November 2024

Current default version: V3

In November 2024, we changed the default version of metapredict from V2 to V3. Small increments (3.0.x) may be made as bug fixes or feature enhancements.

For context, V3 provides major improvements to V2. Metapredict V3 uses a new network to predict disorder that in our benchmarks is the most accurate version to date. In addition, V3 is backwards compatible with V2 and can be used as a drop-in replacement for V2. Although the Python API has been improved to massively simplify how you can use metapredict, we have for the time being updated it such that all previously created functions should still work. If they do not, please raise an issue and we will fix the problem ASAP!

What are the major changes for metapredict V3?

1. A new disorder prediction network: Metapredict V3 uses a new (more accurate) network for disorder prediction. V1 and V2 are still available!
2. A new pLDDT prediction network: metapredict used to rely on an external package called alphaPredict for pLDDT prediction. This same network is still available in metapredict when using meta.predict_pLDDT() by setting pLDDT_version=1. However, the default V2 network is by all metrics better for pLDDT prediction, so we recommend using V2!
3. Easier batch predictions: V2 previously required you to use predict_disorder_batch() to take advantage of the 10-100x improvement in prediction speed on CPUs and GPUs. However, you can now use a single function - predict_disorder() - on individual sequences, lists of sequences, and dictionaries of sequences, and metapredict will automatically take care of the rest for you including running batch predictions if you input more than 1 sequence.
4. Easier access to DisorderObject. You can now return the DisorderObject by setting return_domains=True when using predict_disorder().
5. Batch prediction for all: Previously, batch predictions were only available for the V2 disorder prediction network of metapredict. Now, you can do batch predictions using all of the disorder prediction networks - V1 (previously called legacy), V2, and V3!
6. Batch pLDDT predictions: Batch predictions (and therefore the massive increases in prediction speed) are now available for pLDDT predictions using the predict_pLDDT() function.
7. More device selection: Newer versions of Torch (>2.0) support MacOS GPU utilization through the Metal Performance Shaders (MPS) framework, so you can now choose to use mps on MacOS.
8. More clear device selection: Metapredict used to fall back to using CPU for predictions if it failed to use GPU for whatever reason. This had good intentions but made troubleshooting GPU usage very tricky. Now if you specify using a specific device and it does not work, metapredict will not automatically fall back to CPU.
9. Ability to get protein isoforms from Uniprot: We updated metapredict-uniprot to work with the new version of getSequence, which enables you to input a valid Uniprot ID including designations for different protein isoforms. If you want to predict a sequence from the CLI using the name of the protein and the organism name (optional but recommended), please use metapredict-name as metapredict-uniprot will only work with valid Uniprot Accession numbers.

Installation

Metapredict is a software package written in Python. It can be installed from PyPI (the Python Package Index) using the tool pip. We always recommend managing your Python environment with conda. If these ideas are foreign to you, we recommend reading up a bit on Python package management and conda before continuing.

TL/DR: Recommended install commands are:

In most situations, the following two commands will ensure all the necessary dependencies are installed and work correctly:

# ensure dependencies are from the same ecosystem (conda)
conda install -c conda-forge -c pytorch python=3.11 numpy pytorch scipy cython matplotlib

# install from PyPI
pip install metapredict

To check the installation has worked run:

metapredict-predict-disorder --help	

from the command line; this should yield help info on the metapredict-predict-disorder command.

WARNING: Segfault when mixing conda and pip installs (March 2024)

As of at least PyTorch 2.2.2 on macOS, there are binary incompatibilities between pip and conda versions of PyTorch and numpy. Therefore, it is essential your numpy and PyTorch installs are from the same package manager. metapredict will - by default - pull dependencies from PyPI. However, other packages installed from conda may require conda-dependent numpy installations, which can "brick" a previously-working installation.

WARNING: Problems with installing Torch with propert CUDA version (November 2024).

This is only relevent if you are trying to run metapredict on a CUDA-enabled GPU!

If you are on an older version of CUDA, a torch version that does not have the correct CUDA version will be installed. This can cause a segfault when running metapredict. To fix this, you need to install torch for your specific CUDA version. For example, to install PyTorch on Linux using pip with a CUDA version of 12.1, you would run:

pip install torch --index-url https://download.pytorch.org/whl/cu121

To figure out which version of CUDA you currently have (assuming you have a CUDA-enabled GPU that is set up correctly), you need to run:

nvidia-smi

Which should return information about your GPU, NVIDIA driver version, and your CUDA version at the top.

Please see the PyTorch install instructions for more info.

Extended installation info

The current stable version of metapredict is available through GitHub or the Python Package Index (PyPI).

To install from PyPI, run:

pip install metapredict

You can also install the current development version from

pip install git+https://[email protected]/idptools/metapredict

To clone the GitHub repository and gain the ability to modify a local copy of the code, run

git clone https://github.com/idptools/metapredict.git
cd metapredict
pip install -e .

Note you will need the -e flag to ensure the cython code compiles correctly, but this also means the installed version is linked to the local version of the code.

This will install metapredict locally. If you modify the source code in the local repository, be sure to re-install with pip.

Documentation

Documentation for metapredict V3 automatically builds from the /doc directory in this repository and is hosted at https://metapredict.readthedocs.io/.

In brief, metapredict provides both command-line tools and a set of user-face functions from the metapredict python module. Both sets of tools are fully documented online.

How can I use metapredict?

Metapredict can be used in five different ways:

1. As a stand-alone command-line tool (installable via pip - the code in this repository).
2. As a Python library for integrating into your favorite bioinformatics pipeline (installable via pip - the code in this repository).
3. As a web-server for examining disorder predictions on individual sequences found at https://metapredict.net/.
4. NEW as of August 2022: as a Google Colab notebook for batch-predicting disorder scores for larger numbers of sequences: LINK HERE. Performance-wise, batch mode can predict the entire yeast proteome in ~1.5 min using the Colab Notebook and much faster if using a local GPU.
5. NEW as of May 2023: as part of the ALBATROSS paper, we provide a colab notebook for predicting IDRs on a proteome-wide scale LINK HERE.

How to cite

If you use metapredict for your work, please cite the metapredict paper:

Emenecker, R. J., Griffith, D. & Holehouse, A. S. Metapredict: a fast, accurate, and easy-to-use predictor of consensus disorder and structure. Biophys. J. 120, 4312–4319 (2021).

Note that in addition to the original paper, there's a V2 preprint; HOWEVER, we ask you only cite the original paper and describe the version being used (V1, V2, V2-FF, or V3).

We are hoping to get a paper out for V3 in the near future (we will update this section once the V3 paper is available)...

Changes

For changes see the changelog.md file in this directory or check them out in Github here.

Running tests

Note that to run tests you must compile the cython code in place. We suggest doing this by running the following set of commands:

pip uninstall metapredict; rm -rf build dist *.egg-info; python -m build; pip install .*

Acknowledgements

A modified version of PARROT, created by Dan Griffith, was used to generate the network used for metapredict V3. The original implementation of PARROT was used to generate the V1 and V2 networks. See https://pypi.org/project/idptools-parrot/ for some very cool machine learning stuff. You can also check out the PARROT paper.

In addition to using Dan Griffith's tool for creating metapredict, the original code for encode_sequence.py was written by Dan.

We would like to thank the DeepMind team for developing AlphaFold2 and EBI/UniProt for making these data so readily available.

We would also like to thank the team at MobiDB for creating the database that was used to train metapredict V1. Check out their awesome stuff at https://mobidb.bio.unipd.it

Copyright

Copyright (c) 2020-2024, Holehouse Lab - Washington University School of Medicine