The regulation of various cellular processes heavily relies on the protein
complexes within a living cell, necessitating a comprehensive understanding of
their three-dimensional structures to elucidate the underlying mechanisms.
While neural docking techniques have exhibited promising outcomes in binary
protein docking, the application of advanced neural architectures to multimeric
protein docking remains uncertain. This study introduces SyNDock, an automated
framework that swiftly assembles precise multimeric complexes within seconds,
showcasing performance that can potentially surpass or be on par with recent
advanced approaches. SyNDock possesses several appealing advantages not present
in previous approaches. Firstly, SyNDock formulates multimeric protein docking
as a problem of learning global transformations to holistically depict the
placement of chain units of a complex, enabling a learning-centric solution.
Secondly, SyNDock proposes a trainable two-step SE(3) algorithm, involving
initial pairwise transformation and confidence estimation, followed by global
transformation synchronization. This enables effective learning for assembling
the complex in a globally consistent manner. Lastly, extensive experiments
conducted on our proposed benchmark dataset demonstrate that SyNDock
outperforms existing docking software in crucial performance metrics, including
accuracy and runtime. For instance, it achieves a 4.5% improvement in
performance and a remarkable millionfold acceleration in speed