Title: DISPROTBENCH: A Disorder-Aware, Task-Rich Benchmark for Evaluating Protein Structure Prediction in Realistic Biological Contexts
Primary area: datasets and benchmarks
Keywords: Protein Structure Prediction Model; Protein Intrinsically Disordered Regions; Benchmark

Abstract: Recent advances in protein structure prediction have achieved near-atomic accuracy for well-folded proteins. However, current benchmarks inadequately assess model performance in biologically challenging contexts, especially those involving intrinsically disordered regions (IDRs), limiting their utility in applications like drug discovery, disease variant interpretation, and protein interface design. We introduce DisProtBench, a comprehensive benchmark for evaluating protein structure prediction models (PSPMs) under structural disorder and complex biological conditions. DisProtBench spans three key axes: (1) Data complexity—covering disordered regions, G protein-coupled receptors (GPCR)–ligand pairs, and multimeric complexes; (2) Task diversity—benchmarking twelve leading PSPMs across structure-based tasks with unified classification, regression, and interface metrics; and (3) Interpretability—via the DisProtBench Portal, offering precomputed 3D structures and visual error analyses. Our results reveal significant variability in model robustness under disorder, with low-confidence regions linked to functional prediction failures. Notably, global accuracy metrics often fail to predict task performance in disordered settings, emphasizing the need for function-aware evaluation. DisProtBench establishes a reproducible, extensible, and biologically grounded framework for assessing next-generation PSPMs in realistic biomedical scenarios.