Abstract
The generation of de novo protein structures with predefined functions and properties remains a challenging problem in protein design. Diffusion models, also known as score-based generative models (SGMs), have recently exhibited astounding empirical performance in image synthesis. Here we use image-based representations of protein structure to develop ProteinSGM, a score-based generative model that produces realistic de novo proteins. Through unconditional generation, we show that ProteinSGM can generate native-like protein structures, surpassing the performance of previously reported generative models. We experimentally validate some de novo designs and observe secondary structure compositions consistent with generated backbones. Finally, we apply conditional generation to de novo protein design by formulating it as an image inpainting problem, allowing precise and modular design of protein structure.
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Data availability
The training data used for this work is the CATH 4.3 non-redundant S40 dataset, which can be found here: http://download.cathdb.info/cath/releases/all-releases/v4_3_0/non-redundant-data-sets/cath-dataset-nonredundant-S40-v4_3_0.pdb.tgz. The dataset was filtered for structure lengths of between 40 and 128 (see Methods)âthe exact CATH IDs used for the training/test splits can be found in the repository linked below. Source Data are provided with this paper.
Code availability
The codebase used for this work is available at https://gitlab.com/mjslee0921/proteinsgm and the Zenodo repository41.
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Acknowledgements
We acknowledge the CIHR Project Grant (grant no. PJT-153279) and NSERC Discovery Grant (grant no. RGPIN-2017-064) for funding. The funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish or preparation of the manuscript. We also thank the Digital Research Alliance of Canada for computing resources.
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J.S.L. and P.M.K. conceptualized the work, J.S.L. developed the computational results, J.S.K. performed the experimental validation and J.S.L., J.S.K., and P.M.K. wrote the manuscript. P.M.K. supervised the work and acquired funding.
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P.M.K. is a co-founder and consultant to multiple companies, including Resolute Bio, Oracle Therapeutics and Navega Therapeutics and serves on the scientific advisory board of ProteinQure. The remaining authors declare no competing interests.
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Lee, J.S., Kim, J. & Kim, P.M. Score-based generative modeling for de novo protein design. Nat Comput Sci 3, 382â392 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00440-3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-023-00440-3
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