Representing local protein environments with machine learning force fields

Fuente: arXiv
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Autori principali: Bojan, Meital, Vedula, Sanketh, Maddipatla, Advaith, Sellam, Nadav Bojan, Rzayev, Anar, Napoli, Federico, Schanda, Paul, Bronstein, Alex M.
Natura: Preprint
Pubblicazione: 2025
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author Bojan, Meital
Vedula, Sanketh
Maddipatla, Advaith
Sellam, Nadav Bojan
Rzayev, Anar
Napoli, Federico
Schanda, Paul
Bronstein, Alex M.
author_facet Bojan, Meital
Vedula, Sanketh
Maddipatla, Advaith
Sellam, Nadav Bojan
Rzayev, Anar
Napoli, Federico
Schanda, Paul
Bronstein, Alex M.
contents The local structure of a protein strongly impacts its function and interactions with other molecules. Therefore, a concise, informative representation of a local protein environment is essential for modeling and designing proteins and biomolecular interactions. However, these environments' extensive structural and chemical variability makes them challenging to model, and such representations remain under-explored. In this work, we propose a novel representation for a local protein environment derived from the intermediate features of atomistic foundation models (AFMs). We demonstrate that this embedding effectively captures both local structure (e.g., secondary motifs), and chemical features (e.g., amino-acid identity and protonation state). We further show that the AFM-derived representation space exhibits meaningful structure, enabling the construction of data-driven priors over the distribution of biomolecular environments. Finally, in the context of biomolecular NMR spectroscopy, we demonstrate that the proposed representations enable a first-of-its-kind physics-informed chemical shift predictor that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. Our results demonstrate the surprising effectiveness of atomistic foundation models and their emergent representations for protein modeling beyond traditional molecular simulations. We believe this will open new lines of work in constructing effective functional representations for protein environments.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2505_23354
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Representing local protein environments with machine learning force fields
Bojan, Meital
Vedula, Sanketh
Maddipatla, Advaith
Sellam, Nadav Bojan
Rzayev, Anar
Napoli, Federico
Schanda, Paul
Bronstein, Alex M.
Biomolecules
Artificial Intelligence
The local structure of a protein strongly impacts its function and interactions with other molecules. Therefore, a concise, informative representation of a local protein environment is essential for modeling and designing proteins and biomolecular interactions. However, these environments' extensive structural and chemical variability makes them challenging to model, and such representations remain under-explored. In this work, we propose a novel representation for a local protein environment derived from the intermediate features of atomistic foundation models (AFMs). We demonstrate that this embedding effectively captures both local structure (e.g., secondary motifs), and chemical features (e.g., amino-acid identity and protonation state). We further show that the AFM-derived representation space exhibits meaningful structure, enabling the construction of data-driven priors over the distribution of biomolecular environments. Finally, in the context of biomolecular NMR spectroscopy, we demonstrate that the proposed representations enable a first-of-its-kind physics-informed chemical shift predictor that achieves state-of-the-art accuracy. Our results demonstrate the surprising effectiveness of atomistic foundation models and their emergent representations for protein modeling beyond traditional molecular simulations. We believe this will open new lines of work in constructing effective functional representations for protein environments.
title Representing local protein environments with machine learning force fields
topic Biomolecules
Artificial Intelligence
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2505.23354