Morphology-Aware Peptide Discovery via Masked Conditional Generative Modeling

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Hauptverfasser: Costa, Nuno, Zavadlav, Julija
Format: Preprint
Veröffentlicht: 2025
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author Costa, Nuno
Zavadlav, Julija
author_facet Costa, Nuno
Zavadlav, Julija
contents Peptide self-assembly prediction offers a powerful bottom-up strategy for designing biocompatible, low-toxicity materials for large-scale synthesis in a broad range of biomedical and energy applications. However, screening the vast sequence space for categorization of aggregate morphology remains intractable. We introduce PepMorph, an end-to-end peptide discovery pipeline that generates novel sequences that are not only prone to aggregate but whose self-assembly is steered toward fibrillar or spherical morphologies by conditioning on isolated peptide descriptors that serve as morphology proxies. To this end, we compiled a new dataset by leveraging existing aggregation propensity datasets and extracting geometric and physicochemical descriptors. This dataset is then used to train a Transformer-based Conditional Variational Autoencoder with a masking mechanism, which generates novel peptides under arbitrary conditioning. After filtering to ensure design specifications and validation of generated sequences through coarse-grained molecular dynamics (CG-MD) simulations, PepMorph yielded 83% success rate under our CG-MD validation protocol and morphology criterion for the targeted class, showcasing its promise as a framework for application-driven peptide discovery.
format Preprint
id arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2509_02060
institution arXiv
publishDate 2025
record_format arxiv
spellingShingle Morphology-Aware Peptide Discovery via Masked Conditional Generative Modeling
Costa, Nuno
Zavadlav, Julija
Biomolecules
Machine Learning
Peptide self-assembly prediction offers a powerful bottom-up strategy for designing biocompatible, low-toxicity materials for large-scale synthesis in a broad range of biomedical and energy applications. However, screening the vast sequence space for categorization of aggregate morphology remains intractable. We introduce PepMorph, an end-to-end peptide discovery pipeline that generates novel sequences that are not only prone to aggregate but whose self-assembly is steered toward fibrillar or spherical morphologies by conditioning on isolated peptide descriptors that serve as morphology proxies. To this end, we compiled a new dataset by leveraging existing aggregation propensity datasets and extracting geometric and physicochemical descriptors. This dataset is then used to train a Transformer-based Conditional Variational Autoencoder with a masking mechanism, which generates novel peptides under arbitrary conditioning. After filtering to ensure design specifications and validation of generated sequences through coarse-grained molecular dynamics (CG-MD) simulations, PepMorph yielded 83% success rate under our CG-MD validation protocol and morphology criterion for the targeted class, showcasing its promise as a framework for application-driven peptide discovery.
title Morphology-Aware Peptide Discovery via Masked Conditional Generative Modeling
topic Biomolecules
Machine Learning
url https://arxiv.org/abs/2509.02060