A structural machine learning approach for rapid prediction of thermodynamically destabilizing tyrosine phosphorylations

Abstract

Tyrosine phosphorylations are a prominent characteristic of numerous diseases, yet it is challenging to identify potentially (dys)functional phosphorylations among thousands of phospho-proteins. Here, we propose a machine learning method to predict the thermodynamic stability change resulting from tyrosine phosphorylation. Our approach, based on the prediction of phosphomimetic stability ( G) from structural features, strongly correlates with experimental phosphorylation stability and mutational scanning cDNA proteolysis data (R = 0.55-0.67). We apply our approach to predict the potential destabilizing effects of all 384,858 tyrosine residues from the Alphafold2 database, the PhosphoSitePlus database, and on a pan-cancer phosphoproteomics dataset with 11 cancer subtypes. We predict destabilizing phosphorylations in both oncogenes and tumor suppressors, and G values and local protein circuit topology features are able to distinguish phospho-proteins that are known to be dysregulated in cancer. Our approach can enable rapid screening of destabilizing phosphorylations and phosphomimetic mutations.