When homologous sequences meet structural decoys: Accurate contact prediction by tFold in CASP14—(tFold for CASP14 contact prediction)

In this paper, we report our tFold framework's performance on the inter‐residue contact prediction task in the 14th Critical Assessment of protein Structure Prediction (CASP14). Our tFold framework seamlessly combines both homologous sequences and structural decoys under an ultra‐deep network architecture. Squeeze‐excitation and axial attention mechanisms are employed to effectively capture inter‐residue interactions. In CASP14, our best predictor achieves 41.78% in the averaged top‐L precision for long‐range contacts for all the 22 free‐modeling (FM) targets, and ranked 1st among all the 60 participating teams. The tFold web server is now freely available at: https://drug.ai.tencent.com/console/en/tfold.