Leveraging Protein Language Model Embeddings for Catalytic Turnover Prediction of Adenylate Kinase Orthologs in a Low-Data Regime

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Auteurs principaux: Muir, Duncan F., Grosjean, Parker, Pinney, Margaux M., Keiser, Michael J.
Format: Preprint
Publié: 2025
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author Muir, Duncan F.
Grosjean, Parker
Pinney, Margaux M.
Keiser, Michael J.
author_facet Muir, Duncan F.
Grosjean, Parker
Pinney, Margaux M.
Keiser, Michael J.
contents Accurate prediction of enzymatic activity from amino acid sequences could drastically accelerate enzyme engineering for applications such as bioremediation and therapeutics development. In recent years, Protein Language Model (PLM) embeddings have been increasingly leveraged as the input into sequence-to-function models. Here, we use consistently collected catalytic turnover observations for 175 orthologs of the enzyme Adenylate Kinase (ADK) as a test case to assess the use of PLMs and their embeddings in enzyme kinetic prediction tasks. In this study, we show that nonlinear probing of PLM embeddings outperforms baseline embeddings (one-hot-encoding) and the specialized $k_{cat}$ (catalytic turnover number) prediction models DLKcat and CatPred. We also compared fixed and learnable aggregation of PLM embeddings for $k_{cat}$ prediction and found that transformer-based learnable aggregation of amino-acid PLM embeddings is generally the most performant. Additionally, we found that ESMC 600M embeddings marginally outperform other PLM embeddings for $k_{cat}$ prediction. We explored Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) masked language model fine-tuning and direct fine-tuning for sequence-to-$k_{cat}$ mapping, where we found no difference or a drop in performance compared to zero-shot embeddings, respectively. And we investigated the distinct hidden representations in PLM encoders and found that earlier layer embeddings perform comparable to or worse than the final layer. Overall, this study assesses the state of the field for leveraging PLMs for sequence-to-$k_{cat}$ prediction on a set of diverse ADK orthologs.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_03066
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Leveraging Protein Language Model Embeddings for Catalytic Turnover Prediction of Adenylate Kinase Orthologs in a Low-Data Regime
Muir, Duncan F.
Grosjean, Parker
Pinney, Margaux M.
Keiser, Michael J.
Quantitative Methods
Accurate prediction of enzymatic activity from amino acid sequences could drastically accelerate enzyme engineering for applications such as bioremediation and therapeutics development. In recent years, Protein Language Model (PLM) embeddings have been increasingly leveraged as the input into sequence-to-function models. Here, we use consistently collected catalytic turnover observations for 175 orthologs of the enzyme Adenylate Kinase (ADK) as a test case to assess the use of PLMs and their embeddings in enzyme kinetic prediction tasks. In this study, we show that nonlinear probing of PLM embeddings outperforms baseline embeddings (one-hot-encoding) and the specialized $k_{cat}$ (catalytic turnover number) prediction models DLKcat and CatPred. We also compared fixed and learnable aggregation of PLM embeddings for $k_{cat}$ prediction and found that transformer-based learnable aggregation of amino-acid PLM embeddings is generally the most performant. Additionally, we found that ESMC 600M embeddings marginally outperform other PLM embeddings for $k_{cat}$ prediction. We explored Low-Rank Adaptation (LoRA) masked language model fine-tuning and direct fine-tuning for sequence-to-$k_{cat}$ mapping, where we found no difference or a drop in performance compared to zero-shot embeddings, respectively. And we investigated the distinct hidden representations in PLM encoders and found that earlier layer embeddings perform comparable to or worse than the final layer. Overall, this study assesses the state of the field for leveraging PLMs for sequence-to-$k_{cat}$ prediction on a set of diverse ADK orthologs.
title Leveraging Protein Language Model Embeddings for Catalytic Turnover Prediction of Adenylate Kinase Orthologs in a Low-Data Regime
topic Quantitative Methods
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.03066