palmsite 0.2.0

PalmSite: RdRP catalytic center predictor

PalmSite — RdRP catalytic center predictor

PalmSite is a fast command-line tool that predicts the RNA-dependent RNA polymerase (RdRP) catalytic center from protein FASTA and outputs GFF3. As of v0.2.0, PalmSite can also optionally output per-residue attention weights and span parameters in JSON.

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Highlights

• One command from FASTA → GFF3:

  palmsite <fasta ...>
  

• New: optional JSON output of residue-wise attention and span details:

  palmsite --attn-json details.json <fasta>
  

• High precision and recall AUC (internal benchmarks):

Backbone (ESM-C)	Positives vs. Negatives	Positives vs. Rest
6b	0.9998	0.9848
600m	0.9992	0.9687
300m	0.9991	0.9755

• Detects distant homologs (e.g., HSRV RdRP in Urayama et al., 2024).

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Installation

conda create -n palmsite python=3.11
conda activate palmsite
pip install palmsite

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Quickstart

# Basic (default backbone: 600m, local)
palmsite -o hsrv_rdrp-domain.gff examples/hsrv_proteins.fasta

# Or write to stdout
palmsite examples/hsrv_proteins.fasta > hsrv_rdrp-domain.gff

# Quiet mode
palmsite -q examples/sars-cov-2_proteins.fasta

# Increase reporting threshold
palmsite -p 0.9 examples/zikavirus_proteins.fasta

# Use 6B (Forge)
palmsite -b 6b -k <FORGE_TOKEN> examples/turnip-mosaic-virus_proteins.fasta

Notes:

• -b/--backbone selects the ESM-C embedding model: 300m, 600m (local), or 6b (Forge).
• For 6b, set -k <token> or export ESM_FORGE_TOKEN.

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NEW: Attention JSON output

PalmSite now supports optional per-residue attention-weight output in JSON format:

palmsite \
  -o result.gff \
  --attn-json attention_details.json \
  examples/myproteins.fasta

Each entry corresponds to one embedded chunk and includes:

{
  "chunk_id": {
    "L": <length>,
    "orig_start": <absolute_start>,
    "orig_len": <protein_length>,
    "mu": <anchor_mu>,
    "sigma": <anchor_sigma>,
    "mu_attn": <gaussian_mu>,
    "sigma_attn": <gaussian_sigma>,
    "S_norm": <span_start_norm>,
    "E_norm": <span_end_norm>,
    "S_idx": <span_start_index>,
    "E_idx": <span_end_index>,
    "P": <probability>,
    "w": [... per-residue attention weights ...],
    "abs_pos": [... absolute positions ...]
  }
}

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Command-line usage

Usage: palmsite [OPTIONS] [FASTAS]...

PalmSite — RdRP catalytic center predictor.
Usage: palmsite -p 0.5 [-o result.gff] [--attn-json details.json] <fasta ...>

Options

  --version                       Show version and exit
  -o, --gff-out PATH              Write GFF3; default: stdout
  -p, --min-p FLOAT               Minimum probability for GFF [default: 0.5]
  -b, --backbone [300m|600m|6b]   Embedding backbone (local or Forge)
  -m, --model-id TEXT             HF model repo for PalmSite weights (default: ryota-sugimoto/palmsite)
  -d, --device [auto|cpu|cuda]    Device for local models (ignored for 6b)
  -k, --token TEXT                Forge token for 6B (or set ESM_FORGE_TOKEN)
  -t, --tmp-dir PATH              Temp directory (default: auto-created)
  -q, --quiet                     Suppress logs
  -v, --verbose                   Debug logs (overrides quiet)
  --keep-tmp                      Keep temp files (sanitized FASTA + per-batch embeddings)
  --attn-json PATH                Write per-residue attention JSON (can be large)
  --micro-batch-seqs INTEGER      Micro-batch size in number of sequences
  --micro-batch-tokens INTEGER    Micro-batch size cap in ~tokens (sum(len(seq)+2))
  FASTAS...                       One or more FASTA files

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What PalmSite does

1. Sanitize & merge FASTA

Removes unusual characters, replaces with X, drops sequences with too many corrections, and writes a clean merged FASTA. (src: sanitize.py)

2. Embed sequences

The embedding engine (_embed_impl.py) generates an HDF5 file containing token-wise ESM-C embeddings:

• 300m / 600m — local Hugging Face models
• 6B — via ESM Forge API

Streaming micro-batches (v0.2.0+): the CLI runs embedding and prediction in small micro-batches, emitting GFF3 rows incrementally and deleting each temporary embedding HDF5 right after it is consumed (unless you pass --keep-tmp). This avoids large peak disk usage for big FASTA inputs.

Tune with:

• --micro-batch-tokens (default: ~80k for local backbones, ~120k for 6b)
• --micro-batch-seqs (optional hard cap on number of sequences per batch)

3. Predict RdRP domains

Prediction code lives in:

• _predict_impl.py (full engine with CSV, GFF3, HDF5 export, and JSON export)
• infer_simple.py (minimal GFF3 generator, now with JSON support)

Outputs include:

• GFF3 spans
• (New) JSON with attention maps

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Output files

1. GFF3 (default)

Contains one feature per protein:

Attribute	Meaning
P	RdRP probability
sigma	attention span width
Chunk / ChunkOrWindow	source chunk or window
SpanSource	kSigma or HPD
AttnMass	HPD mass used (if enabled)
AttnEntropy	attention entropy

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Environment variables

• ESM_FORGE_TOKEN — token for Forge when using -b 6b
• PALMSITE_MODEL_ID — override default HF repo
• PALMSITE_MODEL_REV — optional model revision

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Version: 0.2.0

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Citation

(Coming soon.)