Back

Learning Dynamic Protein Representations at Scale with Distograms

Portal, N.; Karroucha, W.; Mallet, V.; Bonomi, M.

2026-02-02 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.01.29.702509 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Protein function and other biological properties often depend on structural dynamics, yet most machine-learning predictors rely on static representations. Physics-based molecular simulations can describe conformational variability but remain computationally prohibitive at scale. Generative models provide a more efficient alternative, though their ability to produce accurate conformational ensembles is still limited. In this work, we bypass expensive simulations by leveraging residue-residue distance probability distributions (distograms) from structure predictors such as AlphaFold2. Our approach provides a scalable way to encode dynamic information into protein representations, aiming to improve function prediction without explicit conformational sampling.

Matching journals

The top 1 journal accounts 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.