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Protein structure generation via folding diffusion

Author

Listed:
  • Kevin E. Wu

    (Stanford University
    Stanford University
    Stanford University School of Medicine)

  • Kevin K. Yang

    (Microsoft Research)

  • Rianne Berg

    (Microsoft Research)

  • Sarah Alamdari

    (Microsoft Research)

  • James Y. Zou

    (Stanford University
    Stanford University School of Medicine)

  • Alex X. Lu

    (Microsoft Research)

  • Ava P. Amini

    (Microsoft Research)

Abstract

The ability to computationally generate novel yet physically foldable protein structures could lead to new biological discoveries and new treatments targeting yet incurable diseases. Despite recent advances in protein structure prediction, directly generating diverse, novel protein structures from neural networks remains difficult. In this work, we present a diffusion-based generative model that generates protein backbone structures via a procedure inspired by the natural folding process. We describe a protein backbone structure as a sequence of angles capturing the relative orientation of the constituent backbone atoms, and generate structures by denoising from a random, unfolded state towards a stable folded structure. Not only does this mirror how proteins natively twist into energetically favorable conformations, the inherent shift and rotational invariance of this representation crucially alleviates the need for more complex equivariant networks. We train a denoising diffusion probabilistic model with a simple transformer backbone and demonstrate that our resulting model unconditionally generates highly realistic protein structures with complexity and structural patterns akin to those of naturally-occurring proteins. As a useful resource, we release an open-source codebase and trained models for protein structure diffusion.

Suggested Citation

  • Kevin E. Wu & Kevin K. Yang & Rianne Berg & Sarah Alamdari & James Y. Zou & Alex X. Lu & Ava P. Amini, 2024. "Protein structure generation via folding diffusion," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 15(1), pages 1-12, December.
  • Handle: RePEc:nat:natcom:v:15:y:2024:i:1:d:10.1038_s41467-024-45051-2
    DOI: 10.1038/s41467-024-45051-2
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    References listed on IDEAS

    as
    1. Kathryn Tunyasuvunakool & Jonas Adler & Zachary Wu & Tim Green & Michal Zielinski & Augustin Žídek & Alex Bridgland & Andrew Cowie & Clemens Meyer & Agata Laydon & Sameer Velankar & Gerard J. Kleywegt, 2021. "Highly accurate protein structure prediction for the human proteome," Nature, Nature, vol. 596(7873), pages 590-596, August.
    2. Jeanne Trinquier & Guido Uguzzoni & Andrea Pagnani & Francesco Zamponi & Martin Weigt, 2021. "Efficient generative modeling of protein sequences using simple autoregressive models," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 12(1), pages 1-11, December.
    3. Noelia Ferruz & Steffen Schmidt & Birte Höcker, 2022. "ProtGPT2 is a deep unsupervised language model for protein design," Nature Communications, Nature, vol. 13(1), pages 1-10, December.
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