6.4LGJul 8, 2024
Improving AlphaFlow for Efficient Protein Ensembles GenerationShaoning Li, Mingyu Li, Yusong Wang et al.
Investigating conformational landscapes of proteins is a crucial way to understand their biological functions and properties. AlphaFlow stands out as a sequence-conditioned generative model that introduces flexibility into structure prediction models by fine-tuning AlphaFold under the flow-matching framework. Despite the advantages of efficient sampling afforded by flow-matching, AlphaFlow still requires multiple runs of AlphaFold to finally generate one single conformation. Due to the heavy consumption of AlphaFold, its applicability is limited in sampling larger set of protein ensembles or the longer chains within a constrained timeframe. In this work, we propose a feature-conditioned generative model called AlphaFlow-Lit to realize efficient protein ensembles generation. In contrast to the full fine-tuning on the entire structure, we focus solely on the light-weight structure module to reconstruct the conformation. AlphaFlow-Lit performs on-par with AlphaFlow and surpasses its distilled version without pretraining, all while achieving a significant sampling acceleration of around 47 times. The advancement in efficiency showcases the potential of AlphaFlow-Lit in enabling faster and more scalable generation of protein ensembles.
3.3LGNov 23, 2022
An ensemble of VisNet, Transformer-M, and pretraining models for molecular property prediction in OGB Large-Scale Challenge @ NeurIPS 2022Yusong Wang, Shaoning Li, Zun Wang et al.
In the technical report, we provide our solution for OGB-LSC 2022 Graph Regression Task. The target of this task is to predict the quantum chemical property, HOMO-LUMO gap for a given molecule on PCQM4Mv2 dataset. In the competition, we designed two kinds of models: Transformer-M-ViSNet which is an geometry-enhanced graph neural network for fully connected molecular graphs and Pretrained-3D-ViSNet which is a pretrained ViSNet by distilling geomeotric information from optimized structures. With an ensemble of 22 models, ViSNet Team achieved the MAE of 0.0723 eV on the test-challenge set, dramatically reducing the error by 39.75% compared with the best method in the last year competition.
ProteinAE: Protein Diffusion Autoencoders for Structure EncodingShaoning Li, Le Zhuo, Yusong Wang et al.
Developing effective representations of protein structures is essential for advancing protein science, particularly for protein generative modeling. Current approaches often grapple with the complexities of the SE(3) manifold, rely on discrete tokenization, or the need for multiple training objectives, all of which can hinder the model optimization and generalization. We introduce ProteinAE, a novel and streamlined protein diffusion autoencoder designed to overcome these challenges by directly mapping protein backbone coordinates from E(3) into a continuous, compact latent space. ProteinAE employs a non-equivariant Diffusion Transformer with a bottleneck design for efficient compression and is trained end-to-end with a single flow matching objective, substantially simplifying the optimization pipeline. We demonstrate that ProteinAE achieves state-of-the-art reconstruction quality, outperforming existing autoencoders. The resulting latent space serves as a powerful foundation for a latent diffusion model that bypasses the need for explicit equivariance. This enables efficient, high-quality structure generation that is competitive with leading structure-based approaches and significantly outperforms prior latent-based methods. Code is available at https://github.com/OnlyLoveKFC/ProteinAE_v1.
3.3BMMar 6, 2025
Integrating Protein Dynamics into Structure-Based Drug Design via Full-Atom Stochastic FlowsXiangxin Zhou, Yi Xiao, Haowei Lin et al.
The dynamic nature of proteins, influenced by ligand interactions, is essential for comprehending protein function and progressing drug discovery. Traditional structure-based drug design (SBDD) approaches typically target binding sites with rigid structures, limiting their practical application in drug development. While molecular dynamics simulation can theoretically capture all the biologically relevant conformations, the transition rate is dictated by the intrinsic energy barrier between them, making the sampling process computationally expensive. To overcome the aforementioned challenges, we propose to use generative modeling for SBDD considering conformational changes of protein pockets. We curate a dataset of apo and multiple holo states of protein-ligand complexes, simulated by molecular dynamics, and propose a full-atom flow model (and a stochastic version), named DynamicFlow, that learns to transform apo pockets and noisy ligands into holo pockets and corresponding 3D ligand molecules. Our method uncovers promising ligand molecules and corresponding holo conformations of pockets. Additionally, the resultant holo-like states provide superior inputs for traditional SBDD approaches, playing a significant role in practical drug discovery.