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Biology subjects

Bushuiev, R.

Publications and source records attributed to Bushuiev, R..

2 recordsLinked to original sources

BoltzGen: Toward Universal Binder Design

We introduce BoltzGen, an all-atom generative model for designing proteins and peptides across all modalities to bind a wide range of biomolecular targets. BoltzGen builds strong structural reasoning capabilities about target-binder interactions into its generative design process. This is achieved by unifying design and structure prediction, resulting in a single model that also reaches state-of-the-art folding performance. BoltzGens generation process can be controlled with a flexible design specification language over covalent bonds, structure constraints, binding sites, and more. We experimentally validate these capabilities in eight diverse design campaigns with functional and affinity readouts across 26 targets. In our experiments, binder modalities span from nanobodies to disulfide-bonded peptides, and targets from disordered proteins to small molecules. In particular, we identify nanobody binders for novel targets with low similarity to proteins with already known bound structures. We release model weights, data, and both inference and training code at: https://github.com/HannesStark/boltzgen.

bioengineering↗

Discovery and Characterization of Terpene Synthases Powered by Machine Learning

The exponential growth of uncharacterized enzyme sequences in genomic repositories demands novel tools for functional annotation. Here, we combined alignment-driven structural domain analysis with protein language models to create EnzymeExplorer, a machine-learning pipeline for enzyme function prediction. We applied this approach to terpene synthases (TPSs), which present an ideal model case because they catalyze complex carbocationic rearrangements with unpredictable product outcomes. We detected new structural domains and achieved significantly higher average precision than existing methods for function prediction. By analyzing the UniRef90 database, we identified TPSs overlooked by existing computational methods. Remarkably, we discovered and experimentally confirmed three archaeal TPSs, expanding the known taxonomic distribution of TPS catalysis to a new domain of life. Further in silico screening of archaeal proteomes revealed that terpene biosynthesis is widespread across Archaea. Our approach offers a powerful framework for characterizing enzyme "dark matter" in the rapidly expanding genomic and metagenomic datasets.

biochemistry↗