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Multilingual model improves zero-shot predictionof disease effects on proteins

Chen, R.; Palpant, N.; Foley, G.; Boden, M.

2025-03-14 bioinformatics
10.1101/2025.03.12.642937 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Predicting the functional impact of genetic variants remains a fundamental challenge in genomics. Existing models focus on protein-intrinsic defects yet overlook regulatory constraints embedded within coding sequences. Here, we couple a codon language model (CaLM) with a protein language model (ESM-2) to dissect the drivers of variant pathogenicity. On ClinVar data, both modalities contribute near-equally to distinguishing pathogenic from benign variants. Evaluation across Deep Mutational Scanning and CRISPR-Based Genome Editing platforms in ClinMAVE reveals that loss-of-function variants are governed primarily by residue-level features, whereas gain-of-function variants show a greater relative contribution from codon-level constraints, albeit in a gene-specific manner. A controlled comparison of identical variants in BRCA1 and TP53 further suggests that codon-level signals are elevated in the endogenous genomic context. Together, these findings indicate that pathogenicity reflects both the "product'' and the "process,'' and that the experimental platform may influence which dimension is observable.

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