Title Computational scoring and experimental evaluation of enzymes generated by neural networks /
Authors Johnson, Sean R ; Fu, Xiaozhi ; Viknander, Sandra ; Goldin, Clara ; Monaco, Sarah ; Železniak, Aleksej ; Yang, Kevin K
DOI 10.1038/s41587-024-02214-2
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Is Part of Nature biotechnology.. Berlin : Springer Nature. 2024, Early Access, p. [1-17].. ISSN 1087-0156. eISSN 1546-1696
Abstract [eng] In recent years, generative protein sequence models have been developed to sample novel sequences. However, predicting whether generated proteins will fold and function remains challenging. We evaluate a set of 20 diverse computational metrics to assess the quality of enzyme sequences produced by three contrasting generative models: ancestral sequence reconstruction, a generative adversarial network and a protein language model. Focusing on two enzyme families, we expressed and purified over 500 natural and generated sequences with 70–90% identity to the most similar natural sequences to benchmark computational metrics for predicting in vitro enzyme activity. Over three rounds of experiments, we developed a computational filter that improved the rate of experimental success by 50–150%. The proposed metrics and models will drive protein engineering research by serving as a benchmark for generative protein sequence models and helping to select active variants for experimental testing.
Published Berlin : Springer Nature
Type Journal article
Language English
Publication date 2024
CC license CC license description