Learning conformational ensembles of proteins based on backbone geometry

Fuente: arXiv
Guardado en:
Detalles Bibliográficos
Autores principales: Wolf, Nicolas, Seute, Leif, Viliuga, Vsevolod, Wagner, Simon, Stühmer, Jan, Gräter, Frauke
Formato: Preprint
Publicado: 2025
Materias:
Acceso en línea:
Etiquetas: Agregar Etiqueta
Sin Etiquetas, Sea el primero en etiquetar este registro!
_version_ 1866909898842832896
author Wolf, Nicolas
Seute, Leif
Viliuga, Vsevolod
Wagner, Simon
Stühmer, Jan
Gräter, Frauke
author_facet Wolf, Nicolas
Seute, Leif
Viliuga, Vsevolod
Wagner, Simon
Stühmer, Jan
Gräter, Frauke
contents Deep generative models have recently been proposed for sampling protein conformations from the Boltzmann distribution, as an alternative to often prohibitively expensive Molecular Dynamics simulations. However, current state-of-the-art approaches rely on fine-tuning pre-trained folding models and evolutionary sequence information, limiting their applicability and efficiency, and introducing potential biases. In this work, we propose a flow matching model for sampling protein conformations based solely on backbone geometry - BBFlow. We introduce a geometric encoding of the backbone equilibrium structure as input and propose to condition not only the flow but also the prior distribution on the respective equilibrium structure, eliminating the need for evolutionary information. The resulting model is orders of magnitudes faster than current state-of-the-art approaches at comparable accuracy, is transferable to multi-chain proteins, and can be trained from scratch in a few GPU days. In our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive performance with reduced inference time, across not only an established benchmark of naturally occurring proteins but also de novo proteins, for which evolutionary information is scarce or absent. BBFlow is available at https://github.com/graeter-group/bbflow.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2503_05738
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Learning conformational ensembles of proteins based on backbone geometry
Wolf, Nicolas
Seute, Leif
Viliuga, Vsevolod
Wagner, Simon
Stühmer, Jan
Gräter, Frauke
Biomolecules
Statistical Mechanics
Machine Learning
Computational Physics
Deep generative models have recently been proposed for sampling protein conformations from the Boltzmann distribution, as an alternative to often prohibitively expensive Molecular Dynamics simulations. However, current state-of-the-art approaches rely on fine-tuning pre-trained folding models and evolutionary sequence information, limiting their applicability and efficiency, and introducing potential biases. In this work, we propose a flow matching model for sampling protein conformations based solely on backbone geometry - BBFlow. We introduce a geometric encoding of the backbone equilibrium structure as input and propose to condition not only the flow but also the prior distribution on the respective equilibrium structure, eliminating the need for evolutionary information. The resulting model is orders of magnitudes faster than current state-of-the-art approaches at comparable accuracy, is transferable to multi-chain proteins, and can be trained from scratch in a few GPU days. In our experiments, we demonstrate that the proposed model achieves competitive performance with reduced inference time, across not only an established benchmark of naturally occurring proteins but also de novo proteins, for which evolutionary information is scarce or absent. BBFlow is available at https://github.com/graeter-group/bbflow.
title Learning conformational ensembles of proteins based on backbone geometry
topic Biomolecules
Statistical Mechanics
Machine Learning
Computational Physics
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2503.05738