Embedding-based generative model for protein design

Abstract

A system and method for designing protein sequences conditioned on a specific target fold. The system is a transformer-based generative framework for modeling a complex sequence-structure relationship. To mitigate the heterogeneity between the sequence domain and the fold domain, a Fold-to-Sequence model jointly learns a sequence embedding using a transformer and a fold embedding from the density of secondary structural elements in 3D voxels. The joint sequence-fold representation through novel intra-domain and cross-domain losses with an intra-domain loss forces two semantically similar (where the proteins should have the same fold(s)) samples from the same domain to be close to each other in a latent space, while a cross-domain loss forces two semantically similar samples in different domains to be closer. In an embodiment, the Fold-to-Sequence model performs design tasks that include low resolution structures, structures with a region of missing residues, and NMR structural ensembles.