Arezoo Bybordi,MSc
The Graduate Center, City University of New York
Ion channels are critical therapeutic targets, yet identifying selective peptide modulators is challenging due to the structural complexity of venom toxins. We introduce a multimodal machine learning framework integrating primary protein sequences with 3D structural features, focusing on disulfide-rich scaffolds. We leverage Evolutionary Scale Modeling (ESM-2) to extract representations from 3,889 curated venom sequences. To capture structural realism, we incorporate AlphaFold 3D coordinates, representing peptides as molecular graphs. A key innovation is a graph attention mechanism weighted toward disulfide connectivity, reflecting the importance of cysteine knots in stabilizing toxin-channel interfaces. Preliminary results using ESM embeddings with a Random Forest classifier achieved 85% accuracy and a 0.82 F1-score in classifying Calcium, Sodium, and Potassium interactions. To improve out-of-distribution (OOD) generalization, we fuse transformer sequence embeddings with a specialized graph neural network (GNN). By explicitly modeling geometric constraints and disulfide dependencies, this framework advances AI-driven drug discovery for channelopathies and cancer.
