Pesti-Gen: Unleashing a Generative Molecule Approach for Toxicity Aware Pesticide Design

Fuente: arXiv
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Main Authors: Kim, Taehan, Seo, Wonduk
Format: Preprint
Published: 2025
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author Kim, Taehan
Seo, Wonduk
author_facet Kim, Taehan
Seo, Wonduk
contents Global climate change has reduced crop resilience and pesticide efficacy, making reliance on synthetic pesticides inevitable, even though their widespread use poses significant health and environmental risks. While these pesticides remain a key tool in pest management, previous machine-learning applications in pesticide and agriculture have focused on classification or regression, leaving the fundamental challenge of generating new molecular structures or designing novel candidates unaddressed. In this paper, we propose Pesti-Gen, a novel generative model based on variational auto-encoders, designed to create pesticide candidates with optimized properties for the first time. Specifically, Pesti-Gen leverages a two-stage learning process: an initial pre-training phase that captures a generalized chemical structure representation, followed by a fine-tuning stage that incorporates toxicity-specific information. The model simultaneously optimizes over multiple toxicity metrics, such as (1) livestock toxicity and (2) aqua toxicity to generate environmentally friendly pesticide candidates. Notably, Pesti-Gen achieves approximately 68\% structural validity in generating new molecular structures, demonstrating the model's effectiveness in producing optimized and feasible pesticide candidates, thereby providing a new way for safer and more sustainable pest management solutions.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2501_14469
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Pesti-Gen: Unleashing a Generative Molecule Approach for Toxicity Aware Pesticide Design
Kim, Taehan
Seo, Wonduk
Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Biomolecules
Molecular Networks
Global climate change has reduced crop resilience and pesticide efficacy, making reliance on synthetic pesticides inevitable, even though their widespread use poses significant health and environmental risks. While these pesticides remain a key tool in pest management, previous machine-learning applications in pesticide and agriculture have focused on classification or regression, leaving the fundamental challenge of generating new molecular structures or designing novel candidates unaddressed. In this paper, we propose Pesti-Gen, a novel generative model based on variational auto-encoders, designed to create pesticide candidates with optimized properties for the first time. Specifically, Pesti-Gen leverages a two-stage learning process: an initial pre-training phase that captures a generalized chemical structure representation, followed by a fine-tuning stage that incorporates toxicity-specific information. The model simultaneously optimizes over multiple toxicity metrics, such as (1) livestock toxicity and (2) aqua toxicity to generate environmentally friendly pesticide candidates. Notably, Pesti-Gen achieves approximately 68\% structural validity in generating new molecular structures, demonstrating the model's effectiveness in producing optimized and feasible pesticide candidates, thereby providing a new way for safer and more sustainable pest management solutions.
title Pesti-Gen: Unleashing a Generative Molecule Approach for Toxicity Aware Pesticide Design
topic Machine Learning
Artificial Intelligence
Biomolecules
Molecular Networks
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2501.14469