Back

Fold-Conditioned De Novo Binder Design via AlphaFold2-Multimer Hallucination.

Rustamov, K. R.; Baev, A. Y.

2025-07-05 bioinformatics
10.1101/2025.07.02.662497 bioRxiv
Show abstract

De novo protein binder design has been revolutionized by deep learning methods, yet controlling binder topology remains a challenge. We introduce a fold-conditioned AlphaFold2-Multimer hallucination framework - FoldCraft - guided by a contact map similarity loss, enabling precise generation of binders with user-defined structural folds. This single loss function enforces fold-specific geometry while implicitly optimizing AlphaFold confidence metrics. We demonstrate the methods versatility by designing binders with six distinct topologies. Compared to RFdiffusion, FoldCraft yields higher structural and binding confidence. Applied to VHH nanobody design against four therapeutically relevant targets, our method outperforms RFAntibody in AlphaFold3-based evaluations. FoldCraft offers a general, efficient strategy for structure-guided binder design, expanding the accessible fold space for protein engineering and enabling robust nanobody generation with improved success rates.

Matching journals

The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.