Back

Reading TEA leaves for de novo protein design

Pantolini, L.; Durairaj, J.

2026-02-10 bioinformatics
10.64898/2026.02.09.704813 bioRxiv
Show abstract

De novo protein design expands the functional protein universe beyond natural evolution, offering vast therapeutic and industrial potential. Monte Carlo sampling in protein design is under-explored due to the typically long simulation times required or prohibitive time requirements of current structure prediction oracles. Here we make use of a 20-letter structure-inspired alphabet derived from protein language model embeddings to score random mutagenesis-based Metropolis sampling of amino acid sequences. This facilitates fast template-guided and unconditional design, generating sequences that satisfy in silico designability criteria without known homologues. Ultimately, this unlocks a new path to fast and de novo protein design.

Matching journals

The top 2 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.