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ProStab: Prediction of protein stability change upon mutations by protein language and inverse folding models

Tan, H.; Wei, X.; Lin, S.; Mao, X.; Chen, J.; Sun, H.; Zhang, Y.; Zhou, Z.; Wei, D.; Lin, S.; Xiong, Y.

2025-08-15 bioinformatics
10.1101/2025.08.11.669595 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Predicting protein stability change upon mutation is critical for protein engineering, yet remains limited by the modeling assumptions of physics-based methods and the generalization bottlenecks of data-driven approaches. We present ProStab, a deep learning framework that integrates sequence- and structure-based information, including the mutation-aware sequence embeddings from protein language models and the geometric features extracted via an inverse folding model. Trained on the large-scale Megascale dataset, ProStab demonstrates strong performance across diverse test sets and robust generalization across distribution shifts between the training and test sets. In head-to-head comparisons, ProStab outperforms all state-of-the-art methods with consistently higher Spearman correlation and precision. To evaluate its practical utility, we experimentally validated ProStab-predicted mutations on the model enzyme transaminase. Among the 16 successfully expressed variants, 4 exhibited improved thermal stability. Remarkably, the 1st top-ranked predicted mutation yielded the highest observed enzymatic activity, retaining three-fold that of the wild type after 10 minutes at 40 {degrees}C. To facilitate broader application, a publicly accessible web server has been developed. We envisage that ProStab provides a scalable and accurate platform for intelligent protein stability design.

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