AI enables designing new proteins from scratch

How artificial intelligence can allow producing unseen proteins

image made by the author using stable diffusion and an image of a protein

Since the publication of AlphaFold2, scientists have speculated what the fallout might be from a model that predicts protein structure. Now a new study shows how to use a language model to generate functional enzymes that also display some functional activity.

Alphafold2 showed how using DeepLearning made it possible to successfully predict the structure of a protein from its sequence (here’s for example a tutorial where you can run it yourself). Although this was considered an outstanding achievement, the model is not without limitations.

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Meanwhile, DeepMind is not the only company that has shown interest in the possibility of predicting protein structure. Both Meta (former Facebook)…