Learning the protein language: Evolution, structure, and function
Open accessAbstract
Language models have recently emerged as a powerful machine-learning approach for distilling information from massive protein sequence databases. From readily available sequence data alone, these models discover evolutionary, structural, and functional organization across protein space. Using language models, we can encode amino-acid sequences into distributed vector representations that capture their structural and functional properties, as well as evaluate the evolutionary fitness of sequence variants. We discuss recent advances in protein language modeling and their applications to downstream protein property prediction problems. We then consider how these models can be enriched with prior biological knowledge and introduce an approach for encoding protein structural knowledge into the learned representations. The knowledge distilled by these models allows us to improve downstream function prediction through transfer learning. Deep protein language models are revolutionizing protein biology. They suggest new ways to approach protein and therapeutic design. However, further developments are needed to encode strong biological priors into protein language models and to increase their accessibility to the broader community.
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Written from the paper’s full text.
TL;DR
Protein language models learn evolutionary, structural, and functional organization from large sequence databases, and adding structure supervision improves downstream prediction through transfer learning. The authors present a multi-task LSTM trained on 76 million sequences plus 28,000 structures and show gains in structural similarity, transmembrane prediction, and sequence-to-phenotype prediction.
Key findings
- A multi-task LSTM (MT-LSTM) trained with masked language modeling, residue-residue contact prediction, and SCOP structural similarity prediction learned embeddings that “dramatically outperform” sequence comparison methods and even outperform TMalign for structural similarity; structure supervision was critical for fine-grained organization, and MT-LSTM outperformed the prior SSA-LSTM.
- For transmembrane region prediction, BiLSTM+CRF models using MT-LSTM embeddings significantly outperformed DLM-LSTM embeddings (paired t-test, p=0.044) and also outperformed existing predictors and SSA-LSTM.
- For sequence-to-phenotype prediction on deep mutational scanning datasets, MT-LSTM embeddings with Gaussian process regression achieved an average Spearman correlation of 0.65, significantly outperforming ECNet’s 0.60 (paired t-test, p=0.006).
- The paper notes that language models predicted SARS-CoV-2 spike mutations with high antibody-escape potential, but as of publication viral escape had not yet been experimentally verified.
Methods
- The authors trained a three-layered bidirectional LSTM with skip connections and 1024 hidden units in each direction per layer. The MT-LSTM combined three losses: masked language modeling (10% of amino acids randomly masked), residue-residue contact prediction (contacts defined as residues within 8 Å), and SCOP structural similarity prediction via ordinal regression; MT-LSTM loss weights were λmasked=0.5, λcontact=0.9, λsimilarity=0.1, while DLM-LSTM used only λmasked=1.
- Training data were 76,215,872 UniRef90 sequences (July 2018) and 28,010 SCOPe ASTRAL 2.06 protein sequences with structures, split into 22,408 training and 5,602 testing sequences. Models were trained for 1,000,000 parameter updates with Adam at learning rate 0.0001 on a single NVIDIA V100 GPU; training took roughly 13 days for DLM-LSTM and 51 days for MT-LSTM.
- Evaluations included structural similarity on 100,000 randomly sampled SCOPe ASTRAL test pairs, transmembrane prediction on the TOPCONS2 dataset of 5,154 proteins using 10-fold cross validation, and sequence-to-phenotype prediction on deep mutational scanning datasets using 5-fold cross validation and Gaussian process regression with an RBF kernel.
Limitations
- The paper states that further developments are needed to encode strong biological priors into protein language models and to increase their accessibility to the broader community; it also states that current models make heavily simplified phylogenetic assumptions, treating sequences as independent draws from a star phylogeny.
- The paper states practical limitations including high compute costs, murky design guidelines, ad hoc model development, quadratic scaling of transformers with sequence length (requiring long sequences to be excluded or truncated), and poor learning of long-range dependencies by RNNs.
- Evident from the text: the new results come from a single MT-LSTM architecture and specific benchmarks, and the SARS-CoV-2 escape predictions had not been experimentally verified as of publication.
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Claims the paper makes
0 of 53 cited sources checked · 0 supported · 0 flagged
- Findingown data
Increasing model size improves transfer learning performance.
“We also find that increasing model size improves transfer learning performance.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Including structure supervision in language model training improves the organization of protein sequences by structure in embedding space compared to DLM-LSTM.
“However, this organization is improved when we include structure supervision in the language model training (Figure 4b).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
MT-LSTM representations significantly outperform DLM-LSTM embeddings on transmembrane prediction (paired t-test, p=0.044).
“Furthermore, representations learned by our MT-LSTM model significantly outperform (paired t-test, p=0.044) the embeddings learned by our DLM-LSTM model on this application (Figure 5b).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingcitation
The multi-task learning approach outperforms a two-step learning approach (SSA-LSTM) for structural similarity prediction.
“Furthermore, the multi-task learning approach outperforms a two-step learning approach presented previously (SSA-LSTM)27.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [27] Bepler T & Berger B Learning protein sequence embeddings using information from structure. in International Conference on Learning Representations (2019). PMC12947628 41768824 source
Not checked in the free run.
- Findingown data
By comparing vector embeddings in the learned semantic representation space, we can find structurally related proteins even though their sequences are not closely related.
“Because we embed sequences into a semantic representation space, we can find structurally related proteins even though their sequences are not closely related (Figure 4c, Supplemental Table 1).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim
- Findingown data
Protein sequences embedded by a bidirectional LSTM trained only with masked language modeling (DLM-LSTM) still organize roughly by structure in embedding space.
“We observe that even though the DLM-LSTM model was trained using only sequence information, protein sequences still organize roughly by structure in embedding space.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Findingown data
Averaging TMscore for both comparison directions outperformed other methods of combining the two scores.
“Because TMscore is not symmetric, we calculate TMscore for both comparison directions and average them together for each protein pair. We found this outperformed other methods of combining the two scores.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim - Premisecitation
The sequence representations (vector embeddings) learned by the language model are powerful features for solving other prediction problems.
“The key insight was that the sequence representations (vector embeddings) learned by the language model were powerful features for solving other prediction problems.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [27] Bepler T & Berger B Learning protein sequence embeddings using information from structure. in International Conference on Learning Representations (2019). PMC12947628 41768824 source
Not checked in the free run.
- Premisecitation
Because so many sequences are available, protein language models continue to benefit from increased size.
“Interestingly, because so many sequences are available, these models continue to benefit from increased size 32.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [32] Rives A Biological structure and function emerge from scaling unsupervised learning to 250 million protein sequences. bioRxiv (2019). PMC8053943 33876751 source
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- Premisecitation
Learned protein representations improve predictive ability for downstream prediction problems through transfer learning.
“Learned protein representations improve predictive ability for downstream prediction problems through transfer learning (Figure 5a).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [27] Bepler T & Berger B Learning protein sequence embeddings using information from structure. in International Conference on Learning Representations (2019). PMC12947628 41768824 source
Not checked in the free run.
- Rests on an assumption: Many problems in biology are small data problems; quantitative protein characterization assays are rarely high throughput and methods are needed that can generalize given only 10s to 100s of experimental measurements.
- Rests on an assumption: We are often interested in extrapolating from data collected over a small region of protein sequence space to other sequences, often with little to no homology.
- Premisecitation
The distribution over sequences learned by language models captures the evolutionary fitness landscape of known proteins.
“The distribution over sequences learned by language models captures the evolutionary fitness landscape of known proteins.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Premisecitation
Above 30% sequence identity, structure and function are usually conserved between natural proteins.
“Above 30% sequence identity, structure and function are usually conserved between natural proteins 59.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [59] Rost B Twilight zone of protein sequence alignments. Protein Eng. 12, 85– 94 (1999). 10195279 source
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- Premisecitation
Language models fit on individual protein families are surprisingly accurate predictors of variant fitness measured in deep mutational scanning datasets.
“Riesselman et al. first demonstrated that language models fit on individual protein families are surprisingly accurate predictors of variant fitness measured in deep mutational scanning datasets 29.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [29] Riesselman AJ, Ingraham JB & Marks DS Deep generative models of genetic variation capture the effects of mutations. Nat. Methods 15, 816– 822 (2018). 30250057 PMC6693876
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- Premisecitation
Representations learned by language models are powerful features for learning of variant fitness as a subsequent supervised learning task.
“New work has since shown that the representations learned by language models are also powerful features for learning of variant fitness as a subsequent supervised learning task 32,34, building on earlier observations that language models can improve protein property prediction through transfer learning 27.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 3 sources checked- cites [32] Rives A Biological structure and function emerge from scaling unsupervised learning to 250 million protein sequences. bioRxiv (2019). PMC8053943 33876751 source
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [34] Luo Y Evolutionary Context-Integrated Deep Sequence Modeling for Protein Engineering. in Research in Computational Molecular Biology 261– 263 (Springer International Publishing, 2020).
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
- cites [27] Bepler T & Berger B Learning protein sequence embeddings using information from structure. in International Conference on Learning Representations (2019). PMC12947628 41768824 source
Not checked in the free run.
- Premisecitation
When trained on tens of thousands of evolutionarily related proteins, the learned probability mass function describing the empirical distribution over naturally occurring sequences has shown promise for predicting the fitness of sequence variants.
“When trained on tens of thousands of evolutionarily related proteins, the learned probability mass function describing the empirical distribution over naturally occurring sequences has shown promise for predicting the fitness of sequence variants 29-31.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 3 sources checked- cites [29] Riesselman AJ, Ingraham JB & Marks DS Deep generative models of genetic variation capture the effects of mutations. Nat. Methods 15, 816– 822 (2018). 30250057 PMC6693876 source
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [30] Hie B, Zhong E, Bryson B & Berger B Learning mutational semantics. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst 33, (2020).
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [31] Hie B, Zhong ED, Berger B & Bryson B Learning the language of viral evolution and escape. Science 371, 284– 288 (2021). 33446556 source
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- Interpretationreasoning
In practical implementations, long sequences need to be either excluded or truncated for Transformers.
“Transformers scale quadratically with sequence length, which means that in practical implementations long sequences need to either be excluded or truncated.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim- Rests on an assumption: Transformers scale quadratically with sequence length.
- Interpretationcitation
Existing protein language models based on recurrent neural networks and Transformers do not fundamentally encode key protein properties in their model architecture.
“While demonstrably useful, existing methods based on recurrent neural networks and Transformers still do not fundamentally encode key protein properties in the model architecture and the inductive biases of these models are only roughly understood (Box 1).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites Box 1
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- Premisecitation
Hie et al. presented a GP-based method for guiding experimental drug design informed by deep protein embeddings.
“Hie et al, presented a GP-based method for guiding experimental drug design informed by deep protein embeddings 35.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [35] Hie B, Bryson BD & Berger B Leveraging Uncertainty in Machine Learning Accelerates Biological Discovery and Design. Cell Syst 11, 461– 477.e9 (2020). 33065027 source
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- Interpretationcitation
The inductive biases of existing protein language models based on recurrent neural networks and Transformers are only roughly understood.
“While demonstrably useful, existing methods based on recurrent neural networks and Transformers still do not fundamentally encode key protein properties in the model architecture and the inductive biases of these models are only roughly understood (Box 1).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites Box 1
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- Interpretationreasoning
Long-range sequence dependencies are unlikely to be learned well by recurrent neural networks.
“This problem is less extreme for recurrent neural networks, which scale linearly with sequence length, but very long sequences are still impractical for RNNs to handle and long-range sequence dependencies are unlikely to be learned well by these models.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim- Rests on an assumption: Recurrent neural networks scale linearly with sequence length.
- Premisecitation
Significant effort has been dedicated to understanding protein sequences as emerging from tree-structured evolutionary processes over time or coalescent processes in reverse time.
“However, significant effort has been dedicated to understanding protein sequences as emerging from tree-structured evolutionary processes over time or coalescent processes in reverse time 90,91.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 2 sources checked- cites [90] Nascimento FF, Reis MD & Yang Z A biologist’s guide to Bayesian phylogenetic analysis. Nat Ecol Evol, 1446– 1454 (2017). 28983516 PMC5624502 source
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- cites [91] Rosenberg NA & Nordborg M Genealogical trees, coalescent theory and the analysis of genetic polymorphisms. Nat. Rev. Genet 3, 380– 390 (2002). 11988763 source
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- Premisecitation
Methods for inferring latent phylogenetic trees are frustrated by long run times and poor scalability to large datasets.
“Methods for inferring these latent phylogenetic trees continue to be of substantial interest 92-94, but are frustrated by long run times and poor scalability to large datasets.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 3 sources checked- cites [92] Huelsenbeck JP & Ronquist F MRBAYES: Bayesian inference of phylogenetic trees. Bioinformatics 17, 754– 755 (2001). 11524383 source
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- cites [93] Lartillot N, Lepage T & Blanquart S PhyloBayes 3: a Bayesian software package for phylogenetic reconstruction and molecular dating. Bioinformatics 25, 2286– 2288 (2009). 19535536 source
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- cites [94] Bouckaert R BEAST 2.5: An advanced software platform for Bayesian evolutionary analysis. PLoS Comput. Biol 15, e1006650 (2019). 30958812 PMC6472827 source
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- Premisecitation
Increasing language model scale leads to continued improvements in downstream applications, such as residue-residue contact prediction.
“Recent works have shown that increasing language model scale leads to continued improvements in downstream applications, such as residue-residue contact prediction 70.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [70] Rao R, Meier J, Sercu T, Ovchinnikov S & Rives A Transformer protein language models are unsupervised structure learners. bioRxiv (2020) doi: 10.1101/2020.12.15.422761. source
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- Interpretationreasoning
Sequence length remains a challenge for protein language models.
“Sequence length also remains a challenge for these models.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: Transformers scale quadratically with sequence length.
- Premisecitation
Machine learning-based structure prediction methods explicitly incorporate constraints on protein geometries.
“significant work has been done in the opposite direction of machine learning-based structure prediction methods that explicitly incorporate constraints on protein geometries 3,5,26,87-89.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 6 sources checked- cites [3] Liu Y, Palmedo P, Ye Q, Berger B & Peng J Enhancing Evolutionary Couplings with Deep Convolutional Neural Networks. Cell Syst 6, 65– 74.e3 (2018). 29275173 PMC5808454 source
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- cites [5] Yang J Improved protein structure prediction using predicted interresidue orientations. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A 117, 1496– 1503 (2020). 31896580 PMC6983395 source
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- cites [26] Jumper J High Accuracy Protein Structure Prediction Using Deep Learning. in Fourteenth Critical Assessment of Techniques for Protein Structure Prediction (Abstract Book) (2020).
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
- cites [87] AlQuraishi M End-to-End Differentiable Learning of Protein Structure. Cell Syst 8, 292– 301.e3 (2019). 31005579 PMC6513320 source
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- cites [88] Ingraham J, Riesselman A, Sander C & Marks D Learning protein structure with a differentiable simulator. in International Conference on Learning Representations (openreview.net, 2019).
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- cites [89] Xu J Distance-based protein folding powered by deep learning. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A 116, 16856– 16865 (2019). 31399549 PMC6708335 source
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- Interpretationreasoning
Very long sequences are still impractical for recurrent neural networks to handle.
“This problem is less extreme for recurrent neural networks, which scale linearly with sequence length, but very long sequences are still impractical for RNNs to handle and long-range sequence dependencies are unlikely to be learned well by these models.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim- Rests on an assumption: Recurrent neural networks scale linearly with sequence length.
- Interpretationreasoning
Current protein language models assume that all protein sequences arise independently in a star phylogeny.
“By treating each sequence as an independent draw from some prior distribution over sequences, current methods assume that all protein sequences arise independently in a star phylogeny.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim - Premisecitation
Conditioning on structure improves generative models of protein sequence.
“Early attempts at capturing physical properties of proteins as part of machine learning models have already demonstrated that conditioning on structure improves generative models of sequence36”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [36] Ingraham J, Garg V, Barzilay R & Jaakkola T Generative Models for Graph-Based Protein Design. in Advances in Neural Information Processing Systems (eds. Wallach H) vol. 32 15820– 15831 (Curran Associates, Inc., 2019).
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- Premisecitation
Various language model-based protein embedding methods have been applied to protein prediction problems through transfer learning, including protein phenotype prediction, residue-residue contact prediction, fold recognition, protein-protein and protein-drug interaction prediction.
“Since then, various language model-based protein embedding methods have been applied to these and other protein prediction problems through transfer learning, including protein phenotype prediction 28,32-34, residue-residue contact prediction 32,70, fold recognition 33, protein-protein 71,72 and protein-drug interaction prediction 35,73.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 5 sources checked- cites [28] Alley EC, Khimulya G, Biswas S, AlQuraishi M & Church GM Unified rational protein engineering with sequence-based deep representation learning. Nat. Methods 16, 1315– 1322 (2019). 31636460 PMC7067682 source
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- cites [32] Rives A Biological structure and function emerge from scaling unsupervised learning to 250 million protein sequences. bioRxiv (2019). PMC8053943 33876751 source
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [33] Rao R Evaluating Protein Transfer Learning with TAPE. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst 32, 9689– 9701 (2019). 33390682 PMC7774645 source
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [34] Luo Y Evolutionary Context-Integrated Deep Sequence Modeling for Protein Engineering. in Research in Computational Molecular Biology 261– 263 (Springer International Publishing, 2020).
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
- cites [70] Rao R, Meier J, Sercu T, Ovchinnikov S & Rives A Transformer protein language models are unsupervised structure learners. bioRxiv (2020) doi: 10.1101/2020.12.15.422761. source
Not checked in the free run.
- May combine two claims. 13
- The quote only partly states this claim. 1
- Classified as probably not a substantial claim. 8
May combine two claims.
Findingown dataLearned semantic embeddings from MT-LSTM dramatically outperform sequence comparison methods and even outperform structure comparison with TMalign when predicting structural similarity.
“We find that our learned semantic embeddings dramatically outperform the sequence comparison methods and even outperform structure comparison with TMalign when predicting structural similarity.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataTraining protein language models with self-supervision on large natural sequence data and with structure supervision on a smaller set of sequence-structure pairs enriches learned representations and improves downstream prediction problems through transfer learning.
“The knowledge distilled by these models allows us to improve downstream function prediction through transfer learning.”
- Also stated in: § Multi-task language models capture the semantic organization of proteins · boosted
“Here, we will demonstrate that training protein language models with self-supervision on a large amount of natural sequence data and with structure supervision on a smaller set of sequence, structure pairs enriches the learned representations and translates into improvements in downstream prediction problems (Figure 3).”
- Also stated in: § Transfer learning improves downstream applications · plain
“Learned protein representations improve predictive ability for downstream prediction problems through transfer learning (Figure 5a).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: Many problems in biology are small data problems; quantitative protein characterization assays are rarely high throughput and methods are needed that can generalize given only 10s to 100s of experimental measurements.
- Rests on an assumption: We are often interested in extrapolating from data collected over a small region of protein sequence space to other sequences, often with little to no homology.
- Also stated in: § Multi-task language models capture the semantic organization of proteins · boosted
May combine two claims. The quote only partly states this claim.
Findingown dataMT-LSTM embedding powered GP predicts phenotypes of unobserved sequence variants across datasets better than existing methods, achieving average Spearman correlation 0.65 vs ECNet 0.60 (paired t-test, p=0.006).
“We find that we can predict the phenotypes of unobserved sequence variants across datasets better than existing methods (Figure 5c).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: Many problems in biology are small data problems; quantitative protein characterization assays are rarely high throughput and methods are needed that can generalize given only 10s to 100s of experimental measurements.
- Rests on an assumption: We are often interested in extrapolating from data collected over a small region of protein sequence space to other sequences, often with little to no homology.
May combine two claims.
Findingown dataBiLSTM+CRFs with DLM-LSTM and MT-LSTM embeddings outperform existing transmembrane predictors and a BiLSTM+CRF using SSA-LSTM.
“We find that the BiLSTM+CRFs with our new embeddings (DLM-LSTM and MT-LSTM) outperform existing transmembrane predictors and a BiLSTM+CRF using our previous smaller embedding model (SSA-LSTM).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimMay combine two claims.
Findingown dataStructural supervision is critical for learning well-organized embeddings at a fine-grained level, because DLM-LSTM representations alone do not perform well at this task.
“Interestingly, we observe that the structural supervision component is critical for learning well organized embeddings at a fine-grained level, because the DLM-LSTM representations alone do not perform well at this task (Supplemental Table 1).”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimProbably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).
PremisecitationIn NLP, the number of parameters, rather than specific architectural choices, is the best indicator of model performance.
“This parallels the general trend in natural language processing, where the number of parameters, rather than specific architectural choices, is the best indicator of model performance 52.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [52] Kaplan J Scaling Laws for Neural Language Models. arXiv [cs.LG] (2020).
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May combine two claims.
PremisecitationStructure is more informative of function than sequence and structure is encoded by sequence.
“Although structure is more informative of function than sequence 57,58 and structure is encoded by sequence, predicting structure remains hard, particularly due to the relative paucity of structural relative to sequence data.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 2 sources checked- cites [57] Zhang C & Kim S-H Overview of structural genomics: from structure to function. Curr. Opin. Chem. Biol 7, 28– 32 (2003). 12547423 source
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- cites [58] Shin DH Structure-based inference of molecular functions of proteins of unknown function from Berkeley Structural Genomics Center. J. Struct. Funct. Genomics 8, 99– 105 (2007). 17764033 source
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May combine two claims.
PremisecitationLanguage models learn summary representations that can be used to capture sequence relationships and link sequence to function via transfer learning.
“They also learn summary representations, powerful features that can be used to better capture sequence relationships and link sequence to function via transfer learning 27,28,32-35.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 6 sources checked- cites [27] Bepler T & Berger B Learning protein sequence embeddings using information from structure. in International Conference on Learning Representations (2019). PMC12947628 41768824 source
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [28] Alley EC, Khimulya G, Biswas S, AlQuraishi M & Church GM Unified rational protein engineering with sequence-based deep representation learning. Nat. Methods 16, 1315– 1322 (2019). 31636460 PMC7067682 source
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [32] Rives A Biological structure and function emerge from scaling unsupervised learning to 250 million protein sequences. bioRxiv (2019). PMC8053943 33876751 source
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [33] Rao R Evaluating Protein Transfer Learning with TAPE. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst 32, 9689– 9701 (2019). 33390682 PMC7774645 source
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [34] Luo Y Evolutionary Context-Integrated Deep Sequence Modeling for Protein Engineering. in Research in Computational Molecular Biology 261– 263 (Springer International Publishing, 2020).
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
- cites [35] Hie B, Bryson BD & Berger B Leveraging Uncertainty in Machine Learning Accelerates Biological Discovery and Design. Cell Syst 11, 461– 477.e9 (2020). 33065027 source
Not checked in the free run.
May combine two claims.
PremisecitationThere are examples of highly similar protein sequences having radically different structures and functions and of sequences that can form multiple folds.
“Although it is generally believed that proteins with similar sequences form similar structures, there are also interesting examples of highly similar protein sequences having radically different structures and functions 60,61 and of sequences that can form multiple folds 62.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 3 sources checked- cites [60] Kosloff M & Kolodny R Sequence-similar, structure-dissimilar protein pairs in the PDB. Proteins 71, 891– 902 (2008). 18004789 PMC2673347 source
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- cites [61] Wei KY Computational design of closely related proteins that adopt two well-defined but structurally divergent folds. Proc. Natl. Acad. Sci. U. S. A 117, 7208– 7215 (2020). 32188784 PMC7132107 source
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- cites [62] James LC & Tawfik DS Conformational diversity and protein evolution--a 60-year-old hypothesis revisited. Trends Biochem. Sci 28, 361– 368 (2003). 12878003 source
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May combine two claims.
PremisereasoningUnrelated protein sequences can form the same structural fold and are semantically similar, but this relationship cannot be deduced from sequences alone; supervision is required to learn that these sequences belong to the same semantic category.
“For example, unrelated protein sequences can form the same structural fold and, therefore, are semantically similar. However, we cannot deduce this relationship from sequences alone. Supervision is required to learn that these sequences belong to the same semantic category.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimMay combine two claims.
InterpretationreasoningThere are aspects of protein biology that may not be discoverable by statistical sequence models alone; supervision representing known protein structure, function, and other prior knowledge may be necessary to encode distant sequence relationships into learned embeddings.
“These phenomena suggest that there are aspects of protein biology that may not be discoverable by statistical sequence models alone. Supervision that represents known protein structure, function, and other prior knowledge may be necessary to encode distant sequence relationships into learned embeddings.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: Proteins with similar structures and functions still exist below 30% sequence identity, but they can no longer be detected from sequence similarity alone and it is unclear whether their functions are conserved.
- Rests on an assumption: Evolutionary innovation requires that protein function can change with only a few mutations.
May combine two claims.
PremisecitationLanguage models learn the probability of a sequence occurring and this can be directly applied to predict the fitness of sequence mutations.
“Language models learn the probability of a sequence occurring and this can be directly applied to predict the fitness of sequence mutations 29-31 .”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 3 sources checked- cites [29] Riesselman AJ, Ingraham JB & Marks DS Deep generative models of genetic variation capture the effects of mutations. Nat. Methods 15, 816– 822 (2018). 30250057 PMC6693876 source
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [30] Hie B, Zhong E, Bryson B & Berger B Learning mutational semantics. Adv. Neural Inf. Process. Syst 33, (2020).
Not checked in the free run.
- cites [31] Hie B, Zhong ED, Berger B & Bryson B Learning the language of viral evolution and escape. Science 371, 284– 288 (2021). 33446556 source
Not checked in the free run.
Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S4 (based).
Interpretationnone givenLanguage models capture complex relationships between residues in protein sequences by condensing information from enormous protein sequence databases.
“Language models capture complex relationships between residues in protein sequences by condensing information from enormous protein sequence databases.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claimClassified as probably not a substantial claim. May combine two claims.
Interpretationnone givenFine-tuning pre-trained models can help with model selection but does not fully resolve it.
“Fine-tuning pre-trained models can help with this problem but does not fully resolve it.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim- Rests on an assumption: For individual protein families or application-specific protein datasets, brute force hyperparameter search is the gold standard for selecting model architectures and number of parameters.
Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).
InterpretationreasoningHigh compute costs and murky design guidelines make developing new protein language models an expensive, time-consuming, and ad hoc process.
“High compute costs and murky design guidelines mean that developing new models is often an expensive, time consuming, and ad hoc process.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claimClassified as probably not a substantial claim.
Study design and conductcitationThe study used 5-fold cross validation on each deep mutational scanning dataset to compare methods.
“To compare methods, we follow Luo et al and perform 5-fold cross validation on each deep mutational scanning dataset 34”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claim0 of 2 sources checked- cites Luo et al
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
- cites [34] Luo Y Evolutionary Context-Integrated Deep Sequence Modeling for Protein Engineering. in Research in Computational Molecular Biology 261– 263 (Springer International Publishing, 2020).
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
Classified as probably not a substantial claim.
Study design and conductown dataThe study used 10-fold cross validation to compare methods for transmembrane prediction.
“We compare methods by 10-fold cross validation.”
Quote in the paperSubstantial claimProbably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing).
PremisecitationNew linear complexity attention mechanisms may help alleviate the sequence length limitation.
“New linear complexity attention mechanisms may help to alleviate this limitation 95,96.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 2 sources checked- cites [95] Choromanski KM Rethinking Attention with Performers. in International Conference on Learning Representations (2020).
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
- cites [96] Wang S, Li BZ, Khabsa M, Fang H & Ma H Linformer: Self-Attention with Linear Complexity. (2020). source
Not checked in the free run.
- Rests on an assumption: Transformers scale quadratically with sequence length.
Probably not a substantial claim: may not pass S3 (load-bearing). May combine two claims.
PremisecitationLuo et al. presented a method for combining language model-based representations with local evolutionary context-based representations (ECNet) and demonstrated that these representations were powerful for sequence-to-phenotype mapping on a panel of deep mutational scanning datasets.
“Recently, Luo et al. presented a method for combining language model-based representations with local evolutionary context-based representations (ECNet) and demonstrated that these representations were powerful for sequence-to-phenotype mapping on a panel of deep mutational scanning datasets 34.”
Quote in the paperNot a substantial claim0 of 1 sources checked- cites [34] Luo Y Evolutionary Context-Integrated Deep Sequence Modeling for Protein Engineering. in Research in Computational Molecular Biology 261– 263 (Springer International Publishing, 2020).
Couldn’t be matched to a paper in Crossref, so it can’t be checked.
The paper relies on this without support.
Many problems in biology are small data problems; quantitative protein characterization assays are rarely high throughput and methods are needed that can generalize given only 10s to 100s of experimental measurements.
“A key challenge in biology is that many problems are small data problems. Quantitative protein characterization assays are rarely high throughput and methods are needed that can generalize given only 10s to 100s of experimental measurements.”
The paper relies on this without support.
We are often interested in extrapolating from data collected over a small region of protein sequence space to other sequences, often with little to no homology.
“Furthermore, we are often interested in extrapolating from data collected over a small region of protein sequence space to other sequences, often with little to no homology.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Proteins with similar structures and functions still exist below 30% sequence identity, but they can no longer be detected from sequence similarity alone and it is unclear whether their functions are conserved.
“Often called the “twilight zone” of protein sequence homology, proteins with similar structures and functions still exist below this level, but they can no longer be detected from sequence similarity alone and it is unclear whether their functions are conserved.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Evolutionary innovation requires that protein function can change with only a few mutations.
“Evolutionary innovation requires that protein function can change with only a few mutations.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Proteins exist in physical space.
“Proteins are objects that exist in physical space.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Many fundamental evolutionary processes that give rise to the diversity of protein sequences observed today are understood.
“Similarly, we understand many of the fundamental evolutionary processes that give rise to the diversity of protein sequences observed today.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Physics and evolution are key properties of proteins.
“These two elements, physics and evolution, are the key properties of proteins and our models might benefit from being structured explicitly to incorporate evolutionary and physics-based inductive biases.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Biological sequences are not natural language.
“Biological sequences are not natural language”
The paper relies on this without support.
Filtering sequences based on percent identity is a conventional crude address to the phylogenetic assumption problem.
“Conventionally, this problem is crudely addressed by filtering sequences based on percent identity.”
The paper relies on this without support.
At the upper limit of large natural protein databases, larger models continue to yield improved performance.
“At the upper limit of large natural protein databases, larger models continue to yield improved performance.”
The paper relies on this without support.
For individual protein families or application-specific protein datasets, brute force hyperparameter search is the gold standard for selecting model architectures and number of parameters.
“However, for individual protein families or other application specific protein data sets, the gold standard is to select model architectures and number of parameters via brute force hyperparameter search methods.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Transformers scale quadratically with sequence length.
“Transformers scale quadratically with sequence length”
The paper relies on this without support.
Recurrent neural networks scale linearly with sequence length.
“This problem is less extreme for recurrent neural networks, which scale linearly with sequence length”
The paper relies on this without support.
Increasing model size, compute power, and dataset size will continue to improve performance of protein language models.
“Increasing model size, compute power, and dataset size will only continue to improve performance of protein language models.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Protein language models are transforming computational protein biology today due to their ease of use and widespread applicability.
“Already, these methods are transforming computational protein biology today due to their ease of use and widespread applicability.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Augmenting language models with protein-specific properties such as structure and function offers an already successful route towards richer representations and novel biology.
“Furthermore, augmenting language models with protein specific properties such as structure and function offers one already successful route towards even richer representations and novel biology.”
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
The Gated Attention Unit (GAU) has shown great promise as an alternative to multi-headed self-attention with smaller memory consumption and faster convergence rate.
“Instead of using multi-headed self-attention (MHSA), we adopt the Gated Attention Unit (GAU) (line 8 in Algorithm 1), which has shown great promise as an alternative to MHSAs with smaller memory consumption and faster convergence rate (25).”
From High-resolution <i>de novo</i> structure prediction from primary sequence (2022) · cites this paper as [25]
The original GAU suggests that relu^2 performs better compared to softmax in terms of both computation speed and convergence rate.
“The original GAU in (25) also suggests that relu 2 (•) performs better compared to softmax in terms of both computation speed and convergence rate.”
From High-resolution <i>de novo</i> structure prediction from primary sequence (2022) · cites this paper as [25]
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Evolutionary-scale prediction of atomic level protein structure with a language model
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On the Opportunities and Risks of Foundation Models
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ProtGPT2 is a deep unsupervised language model for protein design
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“Supervised NLP methods, where the input sequences are trained jointly with their labels to produce predictive models, have been applied to various tasks, such as detecting structural similarity or predicting stability 3,4 .”
MethodEfficient evolution of human antibodies from general protein language models
Hie, B. L., Shanker, V. R., Xu, D., Bruun, T. U. J., Weidenbacher, P., Tang, S.-G., Wu, W., Pak, J., & Kim, P. S. (2023) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/s41587-023-01763-2 · Cited by 452 · see citing works
“1c) to learn patterns that are likely to occur in natural proteins 15–22 .”
High-resolution <i>de novo</i> structure prediction from primary sequence
Wu, R., Ding, F., Wang, R., Shen, R., Zhang, X., Luo, S., Su, C., Wu, Z., Xie, Q., Berger, B., et al. (2022) · doi:10.1101/2022.07.21.500999 · Cited by 392 · see citing works
“The OmegaFold model processes a protein sequence with a stack of GAU layers from ( 25 ) instaed of self-attention layers and multi-layer perceptrons.”
BackgroundMethodSelf-citationBefore and after AlphaFold2: An overview of protein structure prediction
Bertoline, L. M. F., Lima, A. N., Krieger, J. E., & Teixeira, S. K. (2023) · Frontiers in Bioinformatics · doi:10.3389/fbinf.2023.1120370 · Cited by 309 · see citing works
“A synthesis of the recent advances in protein language modeling and their applications to protein prediction problems can be found elsewhere (Bepler and Berger, 2021).”
BackgroundRhea, the reaction knowledgebase in 2022
Bansal, P., Morgat, A., Axelsen, K. B., Muthukrishnan, V., Coudert, E., Aimo, L., Hyka‐Nouspikel, N., Gasteiger, E., Kerhornou, A., Neto, T. B., et al. (2021) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gkab1016 · Cited by 251 · see citing works
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Rapid in silico directed evolution by a protein language model with EVOLVEpro.
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Sledzieski, S., Singh, R., Cowen, L., & Berger, B. (2021) · Cell Systems · doi:10.1016/j.cels.2021.08.010 · Cited by 208 · see citing works
Self-citationSingh, R., Sledzieski, S., Bryson, B. D., Cowen, L., & Berger, B. (2023) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2220778120 · Cited by 207 · see citing works
“Specifically, we investigate the pretrained models Prose (30), ESM (76), and ProtBert (27), with default dimensions dt = 6165, 1280, and1024, respectively (SI Appendix, S2).”
Self-citationComprehensive Overview of Bottom-Up Proteomics Using Mass Spectrometry
Jiang, Y., Balaya, R. D. A., Schuster, D., Neely, B. A., Rosano, G. L., Volkmar, N., Momenzadeh, A., Peters-Clarke, T. M., Egbert, S., Kreimer, S. D., et al. (2024) · ACS Measurement Science Au · doi:10.1021/acsmeasuresciau.3c00068 · Cited by 200 · see citing works
Transformer-based deep learning for predicting protein properties in the life sciences
Chandra, A. A., Tünnermann, L., Löfstedt, T., & Gratz, R. (2023) · eLife · doi:10.7554/elife.82819 · Cited by 192 · see citing works
“…model representations are better in general compared, for instance, to MSAs but does show that this is a promising avenue to be explored further since there are recurrent evolutionary relations captured in the representations from such type of language models ( Bepler and Berger, 2021 ).”
BackgroundEmbeddings from protein language models predict conservation and variant effects
(2021) · doi:10.1007/s00439-021-02411-y · Cited by 174 · see citing works
“While we expect that the about twenty approaches that we have compared in several of our recent methods (including the following 13: ESM-1[b|v] Meier et al. 2021; Rives et al. 2021), ProSE[*|DLM|MT] (Bepler and Berger 2019b, 2021), Prot[Albert|Bert|Electra|Vec|T5|T5XL|T5XLNet|T 5XXL] (Elnaggar et al. 2021; Heinzinger…”
InfluentialWu, H., Liu, J., Jiang, T., Zou, Q., Qi, S., Cui, Z., Tiwari, P., & Ding, Y. (2023) · Neural Networks · doi:10.1016/j.neunet.2023.11.018 · Cited by 183 · see citing works
State-specific protein–ligand complex structure prediction with a multiscale deep generative model
Qiao, Z., Nie, W., Vahdat, A., Miller, T. F., & Anandkumar, A. (2024) · Nature Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1038/s42256-024-00792-z · Cited by 178 · see citing works
“Several works have demonstrated that deep generative models are capable of producing de novo-designed proteins with experimentally validated functions, including language models for protein sequence design 9,27,28 and diffusion models for protein backbone generation 29–32 .”
Hie, B., Yang, K., & Kim, P. S. (2022) · Cell Systems · doi:10.1016/j.cels.2022.01.003 · Cited by 147 · see citing works
Protein language model embeddings for fast, accurate, alignment-free protein structure prediction
Weissenow, K., Heinzinger, M., & Rost, B. (2021) · doi:10.1101/2021.07.31.454572 · Cited by 139 · see citing works
FLIP: Benchmark tasks in fitness landscape inference for proteinsPreprint
Dallago, C., Mou, J., Johnston, K. E., Wittmann, B. J., Bhattacharya, N., Goldman, S., Madani, A., & Yang, K. (2021) · bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · doi:10.1101/2021.11.09.467890 · Cited by 127 · see citing works
“The vast majority of representation learning on protein sequences models entire sequences [27, 37, 15, 34].”
BackgroundDevelopment and use of machine learning algorithms in vaccine target selection
Bravi, B. (2024) · npj Vaccines · doi:10.1038/s41541-023-00795-8 · Cited by 130 · see citing works
Scientific Large Language Models: A Survey on Biological & Chemical Domains
Zhang, Q., Ding, K., Lv, T., Wang, X., Yin, Q., Zhang, Y., Jing, Y., Wang, Y., Li, X., Xiang, Z., et al. (2025) · ACM Computing Surveys · doi:10.1145/3715318 · Cited by 155 · see citing works
“Unlike surveys concentrating solely on molecule [53, 239], protein [20, 87, 213, 217], or genome data [44], we aim to provide a comprehensive view of language models for chemical and biological research.”
Machine learning modeling of family wide enzyme-substrate specificity screens
Goldman, S., Das, R., Yang, K. K., & Coley, C. W. (2022) · PLOS Computational Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1009853 · Cited by 120 · see citing works
Genomic language models: opportunities and challenges
Benegas, G., Ye, C., Albors, C., Li, J. C., & Song, Y. S. (2025) · Trends in Genetics · doi:10.1016/j.tig.2024.11.013 · Cited by 133 · see citing works
“…over the past decade, and protein language models (pLMs) trained on these immense data have achieved impressive performance on complex problems such as structure prediction [5] and variant effect prediction [6, 7], to name just a few examples (see [8, 9] for reviews on pLMs and their applications).”
Current and future directions in network biology
Žitnik, M., Li, M. M., Wells, A., Glass, K., Gysi, D. M., Krishnan, A., Murali, T. M., Predrag Radivojac, A., Roy, S., Baudot, A., et al. (2024) · Bioinformatics Advances · doi:10.1093/bioadv/vbae099 · Cited by 118 · see citing works
“How to simultaneously leverage network- and sequence-based link prediction remains an open problem, with valuable initial work [29].”
BackgroundMethodSparks of function by de novo protein design
Chu, A. E., Lu, T., & Huang, P. (2024) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/s41587-024-02133-2 · Cited by 117 · see citing works
A new age in protein design empowered by deep learning
Khakzad, H., Igashov, I., Schneuing, A., Goverde, C. A., Bronstein, M. M., & Correia, B. E. (2023) · Cell Systems · doi:10.1016/j.cels.2023.10.006 · Cited by 113 · see citing works
Contrastive learning on protein embeddings enlightens midnight zone
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“22 23 Abbreviations used: 3D, three-dimensional; BFD, Big Fantastic Database (11); CATH, hierarchical classification of protein 3D structures in Class, Architecture, 24 Topology and Homologous superfamily (1,2); DL, Deep Learning; EAT, Embedding-based Annotation Transfer; EI, evolutionary information; embeddings fixed…”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialTMbed: transmembrane proteins predicted through language model embeddings
Bernhofer, M., & Rost, B. (2022) · BMC Bioinformatics · doi:10.1186/s12859-022-04873-x · Cited by 105 · see citing works
Taxonomic classification of DNA sequences beyond sequence similarity using deep neural networks
Mock, F., Kretschmer, F., Kriese, A., Böcker, S., & Marz, M. (2022) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2122636119 · Cited by 104 · see citing works
Machine learning to navigate fitness landscapes for protein engineering
Freschlin, C. R., Fahlberg, S. A., & Romero, P. A. (2022) · Current Opinion in Biotechnology · doi:10.1016/j.copbio.2022.102713 · Cited by 105 · see citing works
“One method to reduce the data requirement for training is to apply more informative protein representations to supervised learning tasks [14].”
MethodBioSeq-Diabolo: Biological sequence similarity analysis using Diabolo
Li, H., & Liu, B. (2023) · PLoS Computational Biology · doi:10.1371/journal.pcbi.1011214 · Cited by 103 · see citing works
“As one of the fundamental steps in the biological structure and function studies, analysing biological sequence similarities is the foundation of many tasks in bioinformatics, such as protein remote homology detection [1], protein fold recognition [2], protein structure and function prediction [3–5], non-coding RNA an…”
AlQuraishi, M., & Sorger, P. K. (2021) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/s41592-021-01283-4 · Cited by 96 · see citing works
Li, L., Gupta, E., Spaeth, J., Shing, L., Jaimes, R., Engelhart, E., Lopez, R., Caceres, R. S., Bepler, T., & Walsh, M. E. (2023) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-023-39022-2 · Cited by 96 · see citing works
“All models were trained until convergence of the cross-entropy loss value (which is evaluated on the validation data after every epoch), or until the maximum number of epochs, 10, was reached.”
Self-citationLarge language models improve annotation of prokaryotic viral proteins
Flamholz, Z. N., Biller, S. J., & Kelly, L. (2024) · Nature Microbiology · doi:10.1038/s41564-023-01584-8 · Cited by 92 · see citing works
NetGO 3.0: Protein Language Model Improves Large-Scale Functional Annotations
Wang, S., You, R., Liu, Y., Xiong, Y., & Zhu, S. (2023) · Genomics Proteomics & Bioinformatics · doi:10.1016/j.gpb.2023.04.001 · Cited by 89 · see citing works
“, contact maps and structural similarity prediction tasks) to enrich 107 protein language models [22].”
BackgroundTopsy-Turvy: integrating a global view into sequence-based PPI prediction
Singh, R., Devkota, K., Sledzieski, S., Berger, B., & Cowen, L. (2022) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btac258 · Cited by 83 · see citing works
“First, we generate a feature-rich representation of each protein using a protein language model (PLM) (Bepler and Berger, 2019, 2021); next, these features are combined using a convolutional neural network to predict interaction.”
MethodSelf-citationLiu, S., Rodriguez, J. S., Munteanu, V., Ronkowski, C., Sharma, N. K., Alser, M., Andreace, F., Blekhman, R., Błaszczyk, D., Chikhi, R., et al. (2025) · Nature Reviews Methods Primers · doi:10.1038/s43586-024-00376-6 · Cited by 92 · see citing works
“The tools ProtBERT 187 and ProSE 188 rely on sequence embeddings.”
Democratizing protein language models with parameter-efficient fine-tuning
Sledzieski, S., Kshirsagar, M., Baek, M., Dodhia, R., Lavista Ferres, J., & Berger, B. (2024) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2405840121 · Cited by 86 · see citing works
Self-citationShrivastava, A. D., Swainston, N., Samanta, S., Roberts, I., Muelas, M. W., & Kell, D. B. (2021) · Biomolecules · doi:10.3390/biom11121793 · Cited by 87 · see citing works
Generative artificial intelligence for de novo protein design
Winnifrith, A., Outeiral, C., & Hie, B. (2024) · Current Opinion in Structural Biology · doi:10.1016/j.sbi.2024.102794 · Cited by 91 · see citing works
Lindorff-Larsen, K., & Kragelund, B. B. (2021) · Journal of Molecular Biology · doi:10.1016/j.jmb.2021.167196 · Cited by 85 · see citing works
Improving protein succinylation sites prediction using embeddings from protein language model
Pokharel, S., Pratyush, P., Heinzinger, M., Newman, R. H., & KC, D. B. (2022) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/s41598-022-21366-2 · Cited by 86 · see citing works
“Since large protein sequence databases represent vast data goldmines, recently various pLMs have been developed for distilling information from them 26 .”
BackgroundKaminski, K., Ludwiczak, J., Pawlicki, K., Alva, V., & Dunin-Horkawicz, S. (2023) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btad579 · Cited by 84 · see citing works
A survey of geometric graph neural networks: data structures, models and applications
Han, J., Cen, J., Wu, L., Li, Z., Kong, X., Jiao, R., Yu, Z., Xu, T., Wu, F., Wang, Z., et al. (2025) · Frontiers of Computer Science · doi:10.1007/s11704-025-41426-w · Cited by 82 · see citing works
“Pretraining ProSE [18] Prot.”
Biophysics-based protein language models for protein engineering
Gelman, S., Johnson, B., Freschlin, C. R., Sharma, A., D'Costa, S., Peters, J., Gitter, A., & Romero, P. A. (2025) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/s41592-025-02776-2 · Cited by 70 · see citing works
“These models learn meaningful, low-dimensional representations that capture the semantic organization of protein space and have broad utility in protein engineering 2 .”
Connecting chemistry and biology through molecular descriptors
Fernández‐Torras, A., Comajuncosa-Creus, A., Duran‐Frigola, M., & Aloy, P. (2021) · Current Opinion in Chemical Biology · doi:10.1016/j.cbpa.2021.09.001 · Cited by 70 · see citing works
Harnessing generative AI to decode enzyme catalysis and evolution for enhanced engineering
Xie, W. J., & Warshel, A. (2023) · National Science Review · doi:10.1093/nsr/nwad331 · Cited by 69 · see citing works
“…it is worth considering the development of models specifically tailored to the unique requirements of biological research, including proposing biologically meaningful tokenization, structure-informed sequence embedding, and designing a good measure for sequence representation quality [18 ,74 ,85 ].”
Theoretical and Data-Driven Approaches for Biomolecular Condensates
Saar, K. L., Qian, D., Good, L. L., Morgunov, A. S., Collepardo‐Guevara, R., Best, R. B., & Knowles, T. P. J. (2023) · Chemical Reviews · doi:10.1021/acs.chemrev.2c00586 · Cited by 66 · see citing works
AI Methods for Antimicrobial Peptides: Progress and Challenges
Brizuela, C. A., Liu, G., Stokes, J. M., & de la Fuente‐Núñez, C. (2025) · Microbial Biotechnology · doi:10.1111/1751-7915.70072 · Cited by 72 · see citing works
Kant, S., Deepika, & Roy, S. (2025) · Discover Pharmaceutical Sciences · doi:10.1007/s44395-025-00007-3 · Cited by 78 · see citing works
“Despite challenges like computational costs and interpretability, future directions include multimodal protein models and energy-based optimization for de novo protein design [66, 67].”
Ma, W., Zhang, S., Li, Z., Jiang, M., Wang, S., Lu, W., Bi, X., Jiang, H., Zhang, H., & Wei, Z. (2022) · Journal of Chemical Information and Modeling · doi:10.1021/acs.jcim.2c00885 · Cited by 62 · see citing works
CodonBERT large language model for mRNA vaccinesPreprint
Li, S., Moayedpour, S., Li, R., Bailey, M., Riahi, S., Kogler-Anele, L., Miladi, M., Miner, J. C., Pertuy, F., Zheng, D., et al. (2024) · Genome Research · doi:10.1101/gr.278870.123 · Cited by 64 · see citing works
A review of deep learning methods for ligand based drug virtual screening
Wu, H., Liu, J., Zhang, R., Lu, Y., Cui, G., Cui, Z., & Ding, Y. (2024) · Fundamental Research · doi:10.1016/j.fmre.2024.02.011 · Cited by 67 · see citing works
“Understanding the sequence-structure-function relationship of proteins is a central issue in protein biology and is essential for investigating disease mechanisms, protein design and drug discovery [76] .”
BackgroundMachine learning approaches in predicting allosteric sites
Nerín-Fonz, F., & Cournia, Z. (2024) · Current Opinion in Structural Biology · doi:10.1016/j.sbi.2024.102774 · Cited by 61 · see citing works
Evaluating the representational power of pre-trained DNA language models for regulatory genomics
Tang, Z., Somia, N., Yu, Y., & Koo, P. K. (2025) · Genome biology · doi:10.1186/s13059-025-03674-8 · Cited by 63 · see citing works
Ieremie, I., Ewing, R. M., & Niranjan, M. (2022) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btac104 · Cited by 57 · see citing works
“…such as the primary structure of the protein (Chen et al. , 2019; Hashemifar et al. , 2018; Li et al. , 2018), the 3D protein structure (Bepler and Berger, 2021), gene expression profiles (Chin et al. , 2010) and Gene Ontology (GO) annotation (Bandyopadhyay and Mallick, 2017; Jain and…”
Deciphering microbial gene function using natural language processing
Miller, D., Stern, A., & Burstein, D. (2022) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-022-33397-4 · Cited by 57 · see citing works
“Such applications have been used to model various protein characteristics 16 – 19 , discover antimicrobial peptides 20 , and even predict antigens leading to viral escape 21 .”
MethodIn vitro continuous protein evolution empowered by machine learning and automation
Yu, T., Boob, A. G., Singh, N., Su, Y., & Zhao, H. (2023) · Cell Systems · doi:10.1016/j.cels.2023.04.006 · Cited by 57 · see citing works
The convergence of AI and synthetic biology: the looming deluge
Groff-Vindman, C., Trump, B. D., Cummings, C. L., Smith, M., Titus, A. J., Oye, K., Prado, V., Turmus, E. K., & Linkov, I. (2025) · npj Biomedical Innovations. · doi:10.1038/s44385-025-00021-1 · Cited by 73 · see citing works
“Initially, machine learning and biodesign tools were used for biodesign tasks such as predicting protein structure from amino acid sequence 1,2 .”
Pantolini, L., Studer, G., Pereira, J., Durairaj, J., Tauriello, G., & Schwede, T. (2024) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btad786 · Cited by 55 · see citing works
“Two examples of embedding-based alignment (EBA) methods were introduced by Bepler and Berger (2021) and Hamamsy et al. (2023).”
Stražar, M., Park, J., Abelin, J. G., Taylor, H. B., Pedersen, T. K., Plichta, D. R., Brown, E., Eraslan, B., Hung, Y.-M., Ortiz, K., et al. (2023) · Immunity · doi:10.1016/j.immuni.2023.05.009 · Cited by 56 · see citing works
Large language models for science and medicine
Telenti, A., Auli, M., Hie, B., Maher, C., Saria, S., & Ioannidis, J. P. A. (2024) · European Journal of Clinical Investigation · doi:10.1111/eci.14183 · Cited by 59 · see citing works
Linguistically inspired roadmap for building biologically reliable protein language models
Vu, M. H., Akbar, R., Robert, P. A., Świątczak, B., Sandve, G. K., Greiff, V., & Haug, D. T. T. (2023) · Nature Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1038/s42256-023-00637-1 · Cited by 57 · see citing works
“While our points echo previous discussions on the differences between natural language and protein sequences 4,5,12,24,25 , our approach is unique in the focus on building protein LMs that learn true biological principles and in drawing insights from linguistics to reach this goal.”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialKo, Y. S., Parkinson, J., Liu, C., & Wang, W. (2024) · Briefings in Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bib/bbae359 · Cited by 54 · see citing works
“In addition, while Topsy-Turvy utilizes the ProSE [29] protein language model’s N × 6165 embedding for each length N protein sequence, TUnA uses ESM-2’s N × 640 embedding, requiring ∼ 10 times less memory.”
BackgroundMethodProT-VAE: Protein Transformer Variational AutoEncoder for functional protein design
Sevgen, E., Moller, J., Lange, A., Parker, J., Quigley, S. D., Mayer, J., Srivastava, P., Gayatri, S., Hosfield, D. J., Dilks, C. M., et al. (2025) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2408737122 · Cited by 54 · see citing works
Wei, B., Zhang, Y., & Gong, X. (2022) · Scientific Reports · doi:10.1038/s41598-022-23014-1 · Cited by 53 · see citing works
“To utilize the raw drug molecular SMILES string and protein sequence as inputs to the DeepLPI model, we first encode them into numeric vector representations using the pre-trained embedding models Mol2Vec 17 and ProSE 18 , respectively.”
MethodInfluentialSETH predicts nuances of residue disorder from protein embeddings
Ilzhöfer, D., Heinzinger, M., & Rost, B. (2022) · Frontiers in Bioinformatics · doi:10.3389/fbinf.2022.1019597 · Cited by 51 · see citing works
Antibody design using deep learning: from sequence and structure design to affinity maturation
Joubbi, S., Micheli, A., Milazzo, P., Maccari, G., Ciano, G., Cardamone, D., & Medini, D. (2024) · Briefings in Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bib/bbae307 · Cited by 54 · see citing works
“This similarity has led to the development of NLP techniques tailored for encoding and using protein information [77, 78].”
MethodChen, J., Wang, J., Hu, Y., Li, X., Qian, Y., & Song, C.-L. (2025) · Frontiers in Bioengineering and Biotechnology · doi:10.3389/fbioe.2025.1506508 · Cited by 60 · see citing works
“These models are based on the distributional assumption that amino acids appearing in similar contexts tend to have similar meanings (Bepler and Berger, 2021).”
Structure-aware protein self-supervised learning
Chen, C., Zhou, J., Wang, F., Liu, X., & Dou, D. (2023) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btad189 · Cited by 54 · see citing works
Are protein language models the new universal key?
Weißenow, K., & Rost, B. (2025) · Current Opinion in Structural Biology · doi:10.1016/j.sbi.2025.102997 · Cited by 51 · see citing works
Kurgan, L., Hu, G., Wang, K., Ghadermarzi, S., Zhao, B., Malhis, N., Erdős, G., Gsponer, J. A., Uversky, V. N., & Dosztányi, Z. (2023) · Nature Protocols · doi:10.1038/s41596-023-00876-x · Cited by 47 · see citing works
“Another relevant development are embeddings generated by the protein language models, which encode amino acids using numeric vectors that describe their surrounding sequence 173–175 .”
BackgroundEnhancing computational enzyme design by a maximum entropy strategy
Xie, W. J., Asadi, M., & Warshel, A. (2022) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2122355119 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
Recent Advances in Machine Learning Variant Effect Prediction Tools for Protein Engineering
Horne, J., & Shukla, D. (2022) · Industrial & Engineering Chemistry Research · doi:10.1021/acs.iecr.1c04943 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
Evolutionary selection of proteins with two folds
(2023) · doi:10.1038/s41467-023-41237-2 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
“Nevertheless, the rapidgrowthofdiverse sequenced proteins 68 , recent advances in deep learning 69,70 , and increasingly accessible computational resources leave us optimistic that these challenges will be overcome.”
Nallapareddy, V., Bordin, N., Sillitoe, I., Heinzinger, M., Littmann, M., Waman, V. P., Sen, N., Rost, B., & Orengo, C. (2023) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btad029 · Cited by 47 · see citing works
Manfredi, M., Savojardo, C., Martelli, P. L., & Casadio, R. (2022) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btac678 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
“The learned representation captures important features of the proteins, including physicochemical, structural, functional , and evolutionary features (Bepler and Berger, 2021; Ofer et al ., 2021).”
BackgroundMethodInfluentialPLM-ARG: antibiotic resistance gene identification using a pretrained protein language model
Wu, J. F., Ouyang, J., Qin, H., Zhou, J., Roberts, R. A., Siam, R., Wang, L., Tong, W., Liu, Z., & Shi, T. (2023) · Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bioinformatics/btad690 · Cited by 44 · see citing works
“Different protein-language models were applied to develop predictive methods for extracting complex sequence–structure–function relationships (Bepler and Berger 2021, Ofer et al. 2021, Unsal et al. 2022).”
MethodPang, Y.-H., & Liu, B. (2024) · BMC Biology · doi:10.1186/s12915-023-01803-y · Cited by 38 · see citing works
“Its capability to capture semantic information of protein sequence, structure, and function [51] has demonstrated significant potential in a series of studies, including protein design [52–54] and protein function prediction [55].”
BackgroundA protein language model for exploring viral fitness landscapes
Ito, J., Strange, A. P., Liu, W., Joas, G., Lytras, S., Matsuno, K., Nao, N., Sawa, H., Mizuma, K., Kojima, I., et al. (2025) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-025-59422-w · Cited by 46 · see citing works
“We speculated that these challenges can be addressed using protein language models, an innovative technology that has become increasingly popular in the fi eld of natural language processing 31 .”
Synthetic molecular evolution of antimicrobial peptides
Chen, C. H., Bepler, T., Pepper, K., Fu, D., & Lu, T. K. (2022) · Current Opinion in Biotechnology · doi:10.1016/j.copbio.2022.102718 · Cited by 43 · see citing works
Self-citationPre‐Training of Equivariant Graph Matching Networks with Conformation Flexibility for Drug Binding
Wu, F., Jin, S., Jiang, Y., Jin, X., Tang, B., Niu, Z., Liu, X., Zhang, Q., Zeng, X., & Li, S. Z. (2022) · Advanced Science · doi:10.1002/advs.202203796 · Cited by 42 · see citing works
ADOPT: intrinsic protein disorder prediction through deep bidirectional transformers
Redl, I., Fisicaro, C., Dutton, O., Hoffmann, F., Henderson, L. D., Owens, B. M. J., Heberling, M. M., Paci, E., & Tamiola, K. (2023) · NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/nargab/lqad041 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
“In a broader context, our work complements the most recent developments in NLP-based computational biology [see e.g. (66,67)].”
BackgroundMethodDeploying synthetic coevolution and machine learning to engineer protein-protein interactions
Yang, A., Jude, K. M., Lai, B., Minot, M., Kocyła, A., Glassman, C. R., Nishimiya, D., Kim, Y. S., Reddy, S. T., Khan, A. A., et al. (2023) · Science · doi:10.1126/science.adh1720 · Cited by 41 · see citing works
“One solution is the use of protein language models, which are self-supervisedmachinelearningmodelspretrainedonlargeprotein-sequencedatabases( 15 , 26 – 28 ).”
Improving antibody language models with native pairing
Burbach, S. M., & Briney, B. S. (2024) · Patterns · doi:10.1016/j.patter.2024.100967 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
“In essence, each person’s unique collection of affinity matured antibody genes constitutes a detailed molecular record of all previous pathogen encounters.”
Pakhrin, S. C., Pokharel, S., Aoki-Kinoshita, K. F., Beck, M. R., Dam, T. K., Caragea, D., & KC, D. B. (2023) · Glycobiology · doi:10.1093/glycob/cwad033 · Cited by 39 · see citing works
Engineering highly active nuclease enzymes with machine learning and high-throughput screening
Thomas, N., Belanger, D., Xu, C. A., Lee, H., Hirano, K., Iwai, K., Polic, V., Nyberg, K. D., Hoff, K. G., Frenz, L., et al. (2025) · Cell Systems · doi:10.1016/j.cels.2025.101236 · Cited by 39 · see citing works
Qian, H., Wang, Y., Zhou, X.-B., Gu, T., Wang, H., Lyu, H., Li, Z., Li, X., Zhou, H., Guo, C.-C., et al. (2025) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-025-58521-y · Cited by 35 · see citing works
“During the training process, the learning rate was set at 1×10 (cid:1) 5 and the Adam optimizer was utilized 44 .”
Using big sequencing data to identify chronic SARS-Coronavirus-2 infections
Harari, S., Miller, D., Fleishon, S., Burstein, D., & Stern, A. (2024) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-024-44803-4 · Cited by 16 · see citing works
“Recently, language models have gained widespread popularity due to their ability to tackle such large volumes of data and have impacted research in diverse areas of biological sciences, including virology 28 – 30 .”
Domain loss enabled evolution of novel functions in the snake three-finger toxin gene superfamily
Koludarov, I., Senoner, T., Jackson, T., Dashevsky, D., Heinzinger, M., Aird, S. D., & Rost, B. (2023) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/s41467-023-40550-0 · Cited by 38 · see citing works
“As this objective does not require labeled data, it allows mining the wealth of unlabeled data 17 – 19, 60 , i.e. , data In thiswork, we generated embeddings foreachproteinsequence using the pLM ProtT5-XL-UniRef50 18 (for simplicity referred to as ProtT5 ), which has been built in analogy to the…”
Yeung, W., Zhou, Z., Li, S., & Kannan, N. (2023) · Briefings in Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/bib/bbac599 · Cited by 35 · see citing works
“Despite being trained on sequences alone, these models are capable of learning protein representations which encode structural, functional and evolutionary features [3].”
Wang, D., Pourmirzaei, M., Abbas, U. L., Zeng, S., Manshour, N., Esmaili, F., Poudel, B., Jiang, Y., Shao, Q., Chen, J., et al. (2025) · Advanced Science · doi:10.1002/advs.202404212 · Cited by 46 · see citing works
Exploring Scoring Function Space: Developing Computational Models for Drug Discovery
Bitencourt‐Ferreira, G., Villarreal, M. A., Quiroga, R., Biziukova, N. Y., Poroikov, V., Tarasova, O. A., & de Azevedo, W. F. (2023) · Current Medicinal Chemistry · doi:10.2174/0929867330666230321103731 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
CodonBERT: Large Language Models for mRNA design and optimizationPreprint
Li, S., Moayedpour, S., Li, R., Bailey, M., Riahi, S., Kogler-Anele, L., Miladi, M., Miner, J. C., Zheng, D., Wang, J., et al. (2023) · bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory) · doi:10.1101/2023.09.09.556981 · Cited by 34 · see citing works
“Recently, this concept has been scaled to biological sequences (protein, DNA, and RNA) [32, 33, 34, 35, 36].”
BackgroundLeveraging protein language models for accurate multiple sequence alignments
(2023) · doi:10.1101/gr.277675.123 · Cited by 30 · see citing works
“Here, weconsidera new approach to determining the similarities between amino acids across proteins, based on protein language models (Rao et al. 2019; Bepler and Berger 2021; Rives et al. 2021; Chowdhury et al. 2022; Elnaggar et al. 2022).”
Hu, F., Hu, Y., Zhang, W., Huang, H., Pan, Y. F., & Yin, P. (2023) · Advanced Science · doi:10.1002/advs.202301223 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
Superior protein thermophilicity prediction with protein language model embeddings
Haselbeck, F., John, M., Zhang, Y., Pirnay, J., Werner, J., Costa, R. D., & Grimm, D. G. (2023) · NAR Genomics and Bioinformatics · doi:10.1093/nargab/lqad087 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
Gujral, O. S., Bafna, M., Alm, E. J., & Berger, B. (2025) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2506316122 · Cited by 33 · see citing works
Self-citation
- Authors
- Bepler, T., & Berger, B.
- Affiliations
- New York Structural Biology Center (US)
- MIT Computer Science and Artificial Intelligence Laboratory (US)
- Corresponding author
- Bepler, Tristan
- Berger, Bonnie
- Venue
- Cell Systems
- Publisher
- Elsevier BV
- Published
- 2021-06
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 6
- Pages
- 654-669.e3
- ISSN
- 2405-4712 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC8238390
- OpenAlex
- W3166142427
- Cited by
- 483
- References
- 133
- Citations by year
- 2026: 87 · 2025: 120 · 2024: 127 · 2023: 82 · 2022: 55 · 2021: 12
- FWCI
- 21.74
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- hybrid
- doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Cell Systems (publishedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- DSpace@MIT (Massachusetts Institute of Technology) (submittedVersion, cc-by-nc-nd)
- Funders
- NIH (R35 GM141861)
- Simons Foundation (SF349247)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Protein Structure and Dynamics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Fractal and DNA sequence analysis
- Keywords
- protein language models, protein sequence representation, protein structure prediction, protein function prediction, knowledge distillation, transfer learning, protein design, therapeutic design
- MeSH terms
- Machine Learning, Amino Acid Sequence, Language, Proteins, Databases, Protein
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