Large language models improve annotation of prokaryotic viral proteins
Open accessPublished version of a preprint
Abstract
Viral genomes are poorly annotated in metagenomic samples, representing an obstacle to understanding viral diversity and function. Current annotation approaches rely on alignment-based sequence homology methods, which are limited by the paucity of characterized viral proteins and divergence among viral sequences. Here we show that protein language models can capture prokaryotic viral protein function, enabling new portions of viral sequence space to be assigned biologically meaningful labels. When applied to global ocean virome data, our classifier expanded the annotated fraction of viral protein families by 29%. Among previously unannotated sequences, we highlight the identification of an integrase defining a mobile element in marine picocyanobacteria and a capsid protein that anchors globally widespread viral elements. Furthermore, improved high-level functional annotation provides a means to characterize similarities in genomic organization among diverse viral sequences. Protein language models thus enhance remote homology detection of viral proteins, serving as a useful complement to existing approaches.
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
The claims and statistics of this paper haven’t been checked yet.
Run the check — free, no account needed. It reads the open-access text and checks the sources it cites.
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
The self-check needs the paper’s full text.
Cites
Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold
Jumper, J., Evans, R., Pritzel, A., Green, T., Figurnov, M., Ronneberger, O., Tunyasuvunakool, K., Bates, R., Žídek, A., Potapenko, A., et al. (2021) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-021-03819-2 · Cited by 43,764 · see citing works
SciPy 1.0: fundamental algorithms for scientific computing in Python
Virtanen, P., Gommers, R., Oliphant, T. E., Haberland, M., Reddy, T., Cournapeau, D., Burovski, E., Peterson, P., Weckesser, W., Bright, J., et al. (2020) · Nature Methods · doi:10.1038/s41592-019-0686-2 · Cited by 38,430 · see citing works
Harris, C. R., Millman, K. J., van der Walt, S. J., Gommers, R., Virtanen, P., Cournapeau, D., Wieser, E., Taylor, J., Berg, S., Smith, N. J., et al. (2020) · Nature · doi:10.1038/s41586-020-2649-2 · Cited by 23,826 · see citing works
UMAP: Uniform Manifold Approximation and Projection
McInnes, L., Healy, J., Saul, N., & Großberger, L. (2018) · Journal of Open Source Software · doi:10.21105/joss.00861 · Cited by 9,826 · see citing works
The Phyre2 web portal for protein modeling, prediction and analysis
Kelley, L. A., Mezulis, S., Yates, C. M., Wass, M. N., & Sternberg, M. J. E. (2015) · Nature Protocols · doi:10.1038/nprot.2015.053 · Cited by 9,652 · see citing works
seaborn: statistical data visualization
Waskom, M. (2021) · Journal of Open Source Software · doi:10.21105/joss.03021 · Cited by 7,310 · see citing works
Rives, A., Meier, J., Sercu, T., Goyal, S., Lin, Z., Liu, J., Guo, D., Ott, M., Zitnick, C. L., Ma, J., et al. (2021) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.2016239118 · Cited by 3,286 · see citing works
Rives, A., Meier, J., Sercu, T., Goyal, S., Lin, Z., Liu, J., Guo, D., Ott, M., Zitnick, C. L., Ma, J., et al. (2019) · doi:10.1101/622803 · Cited by 3,280 · cited 1× · see citing works
“PLMs are hypothesized to perform best at capturing structural similarity in protein sequences 27,28 ; that ‘head and packaging’ and ‘tail’ have VPFs that are relatively better captured by the PLM could indicate that strongly conserved structural features are a defining characteristic of these VPFs.”
Potter, S. C., Luciani, A., Eddy, S. R., Park, Y., Lopez, R., & Finn, R. D. (2018) · Nucleic Acids Research · doi:10.1093/nar/gky448 · Cited by 2,607 · see citing works
Fast and accurate protein structure search with Foldseek
van Kempen, M., Kim, S. S., Tumescheit, C., Mirdita, M., Lee, J., Gilchrist, C. L. M., Söding, J., & Steinegger, M. (2022) · doi:10.1101/2022.02.07.479398 · Cited by 2,598 · see citing works
Fast and accurate protein structure search with Foldseek
van Kempen, M., Kim, S. S., Tumescheit, C., Mirdita, M., Lee, J., Gilchrist, C. L. M., Söding, J., & Steinegger, M. (2024) · Nature Biotechnology · doi:10.1038/s41587-023-01773-0 · Cited by 2,596 · see citing works
ProtTrans: Toward Understanding the Language of Life Through Self-Supervised Learning
Elnaggar, A., Heinzinger, M., Dallago, C., Rehawi, G., Wang, Y., Jones, L., Gibbs, T., Feher, T., Angerer, C., Steinegger, M., et al. (2022) · IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence · doi:10.1109/tpami.2021.3095381 · Cited by 2,329 · cited 2× · see citing works
“The Transformer_BFD PLM from the ProtTrans 28 project was used via the DeepChainBio/BioTransformers Python package (https://github. com/DeepChainBio/bio-transformers).”
Modeling the language of life – Deep Learning Protein Sequences
Heinzinger, M., Elnaggar, A., Wang, Y., Dallago, C., Nechaev, D., Matthes, F., & Rost, B. (2019) · doi:10.1101/614313 · Cited by 606 · see citing works
Learning the protein language: Evolution, structure, and function
Bepler, T., & Berger, B. (2021) · Cell Systems · doi:10.1016/j.cels.2021.05.017 · Cited by 483 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Multimodal Large Language Models in Health Care: Applications, Challenges, and Future Outlook.
AlSaad, R., Abd-alrazaq, A., Boughorbel, S., Ahmed, A., Renault, M.-A., Damseh, R., & Sheikh, J. (2024) · Journal of medical Internet research · doi:10.2196/59505 · Cited by 349 · see citing works
“…(ProtTrans [127]), protein sequence generation (ProGen [128]), protein function prediction (ProtST [129]), major posttranslational modification prediction (ProteinBERT [130]), biophysical property prediction (PromptProtein [131]), and advancing the state of the art in proteomics [132,133].”
Feature Reuse and Scaling: Understanding Transfer Learning with Protein Language Models
Li, F.-Z., Amini, A. P., Yue, Y., Yang, K. K., & Lu, A. X. (2024) · doi:10.1101/2024.02.05.578959 · Cited by 51 · see citing works
- Authors
- Flamholz, Z. N., Biller, S. J., & Kelly, L.
- Affiliations
- Albert Einstein College of Medicine (US)
- Wellesley College (US)
- Corresponding author
- Kelly, Libusha
- Venue
- Nature Microbiology
- Published
- 2024-01-29
- Volume
- 9
- Issue
- 2
- Pages
- 537-549
- ISSN
- 2058-5276 (ISSN-L)
- PMC
- PMC11311208
- OpenAlex
- W4391316987
- Cited by
- 92
- References
- 14
- Citations by year
- 2026: 30 · 2025: 36 · 2024: 22 · 2023: 4
- FWCI
- 24.14
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- dx.doi.org
- Licence
- Locations
- Nature Microbiology (publishedVersion)
- Research Square (acceptedVersion, cc-by)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- PubMed Central (submittedVersion, cc-by)
- Funders
- U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | NIH | National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (R01HL069438)
- U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | NIH | National Institute of General Medical Sciences (1T32GM149364)
- National Science Foundation (OCE-2049004, OCE-2304066)
- Simons Foundation (917971)
- Topics
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Bacteriophages and microbial interactions
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
- Keywords
- prokaryotic viruses, protein language models, metagenomics, remote homology detection, transposable elements, picocyanobacteria, capsid protein, viral diversity
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
