The DOI matches its Crossref record; 77 of the 77 references it cites were found in a registry or an index; 2 of the 23 sources its claims cite were checked for support.
Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families
Open accessAbstract
Deep-learning language models have shown promise in various biotechnological applications, including protein design and engineering. Here we describe ProGen, a language model that can generate protein sequences with a predictable function across large protein families, akin to generating grammatically and semantically correct natural language sentences on diverse topics. The model was trained on 280 million protein sequences from >19,000 families and is augmented with control tags specifying protein properties. ProGen can be further fine-tuned to curated sequences and tags to improve controllable generation performance of proteins from families with sufficient homologous samples. Artificial proteins fine-tuned to five distinct lysozyme families showed similar catalytic efficiencies as natural lysozymes, with sequence identity to natural proteins as low as 31.4%. ProGen is readily adapted to diverse protein families, as we demonstrate with chorismate mutase and malate dehydrogenase.
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32 Own result · 14 Own interpretation · 11 Not checked yet · 8 Own method · 4 No basis given · 1 Couldn’t confirm · accuracy not yet measured
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In the paper
“This indicates that the model has captured evolutionary conservation patterns without training on explicit alignment information such as with Potts models51, as implemented in direct coupling analysis7,52–55.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [51] Mchaourab, H. S., Oh, K. J., Fang, C. J. & Hubbell, W. L. Conformation of T4 lysozyme in solution. Hinge-bending motion and the substrate-induced conformational transition studied by site-directed spin labeling. Biochemistry 36, 307–316 (1997). source
- Not checked yetcites [7] Russ, W. P. et al. An evolution-based model for designing chorismate mutase enzymes. Science 369, 440–445 (2020). source
- Could not verifycites [52] Kim, J.-K. et al. BetaCavityWeb: a webserver for molecular voids and channels. Nucleic Acids Res. 43, W413–W418 (2015). sourceExperimental — accuracy not yet measured
The Methods and Materials passages describe Voronoi-based identification of molecular voids and channels, not a model learning evolutionary conservation. Searches for alignment information, Potts models, and direct coupling analysis found no passage in our copy addressing the attributed claim. (LLM, conf=0.78)
- Not checked yetcites [53] Rost, B. Twilight zone of protein sequence alignments. Protein Eng. 12, 85–94 (1999). source
- Not checked yetcites [54] Pearson, W. R. An introduction to sequence similarity (‘homology’) searching. Curr. Protoc. Bioinforma. 3, 3.1 (2013). ChapterUnit.
- Not checked yetcites [55] Repecka, D. et al. Expanding functional protein sequence spaces using generative adversarial networks. Nat. Mach. Intell. 3, 324–333 (2021). source
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In the paper
“As in the crystal structure of L056, the predicted artificial structures roughly match known structures found in nature, Fig S11, including for low identity (<40%) artificial sequences.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
What the sources say
- Could not verifycites [14] Jumper, J. et al. Highly accurate protein structure prediction with AlphaFold. Nature 596, 583–589 (2021). sourceExperimental — accuracy not yet measured
The Abstract and Main section describe AlphaFold’s structure-prediction accuracy, including cases without a known similar structure. Our copy does not address whether predicted structures of functional artificial sequences resemble natural structures, including at below 40% sequence identity (searched: artificial sequences, L056, and 40% identity). (LLM, conf=0.77)
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“Our protein language model is trained by simply learning to predict the next amino acid for over 280 million protein sequences from thousands of protein families, without explicit biophysical modeling.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“After training, ProGen can be prompted to generate full-length protein sequences for any protein family from scratch, with a varying degree of similarity to natural proteins.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“Our artificial lysozymes span the sequence landscape of natural lysozymes, Fig. 2a, across five families which contain diverse protein folds, active site architectures, and enzymatic mechanisms49,50.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [49] Baase, W. A., Liu, L., Tronrud, D. E. & Matthews, B. W. Lessons from the lysozyme of phage T4. Protein Sci. 19, 631–641 (2010). source
- Not checked yetcites [50] Kuroki, R., Weaver, L. H. & Matthews, B. W. A covalent enzyme–substrate intermediate with saccharide distortion in a mutant T4 lysozyme. Science 262, 2030–2033 (1993). source
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- Rests on an assumption: The five lysozyme families chosen because they lack disulfide bonds can be expressed in high-throughput cell-free systems.
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In the paper
“they demonstrate similar residue position entropies when forming separate multiple sequence alignments of natural and artificial proteins within each family, Fig. 2c.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“In the positive control set of 100 natural proteins, 72% were well-expressed based on chromatography peaks and band visualization.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“Our artificial proteins match activity levels of natural proteins even at lower levels of sequence identity to any known natural protein, (Fig 3b, Fig. S5).”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“The representative natural proteins exhibited similar levels of functionality with 59% (53/90) of total proteins considered functional.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“None of the bmDCA artificial proteins exhibited a detectable level of functionality, Fig. S10”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [7] Russ, W. P. et al. An evolution-based model for designing chorismate mutase enzymes. Science 369, 440–445 (2020). source
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- Probably not a substantial claim. 16
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In the paper
“ProGen is a 1.2 billion-parameter neural network trained using a publicly available dataset of 280 million protein sequences.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“we could readily measure the KM values for the purified apparent lower molecular weight species, where both L056 and L070 were highly active and had comparable Michaelis-Menten parameters to HEWL (Fig. 3e).”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“Among our artificial proteins, 73% (66/90) were functional and exhibited high levels of functionality across families, Fig. 3c.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“Notably a small number of proteins, both within the natural and artificial proteins, were within an order of magnitude of HEWL, which was substantially more active than all negative controls.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“Two proteins, L056 (max ID 69.6%) and L070 (max ID 89.2%) expressed well and incurred bactericidal activities towards the E. coli BL21(DE3) strain used during overnight induction at 16C.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“The ProGen-generated proteins express equally well (72/100 total) across all bins of sequence identity to any known natural protein (maxID 40–90%), Fig 2e.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“Despite having comparable enzymatic activities, L070 and L056 only share 17.9% sequence ID.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“We also found that there is no bias to location or structural element to the mutations that diverge L056 and L070 from their respective nearest sequence homolog in nature. Differing residues are instead uniformly distributed.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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In the paper
“The KM values of both monomers were too weak to be measured using a heterogeneous, fluorescein-labeled Micrococcus lysodeikticus cell wall substrate (Molecular Probes EnzChek Lysozyme kit); however, both monomers were active using a pseudo-first order kinetic assay (Fig. S7).”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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In the paper
“Some mutations are even found within the active site cleft and within regions that influence conformational state (for L056).”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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In the paper
“We determined a 2.5 Å resolution crystal of L056 (see Methods, Figure 3e). The global fold was similar to predictions, with a Cα RMSD of 2.9 Å from the backbone structure predicted by trRosetta and 2.3 Å RMSD from a WT T4 Lysozyme structure59,60.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
What the sources say
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In the paper
“bmDCA was unable to fit three out of the five lysozyme families, and exhibited 60% detectable expression (30/50 proteins) for the remaining two protein families.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [7] Russ, W. P. et al. An evolution-based model for designing chorismate mutase enzymes. Science 369, 440–445 (2020). source
plainn = 5- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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In the paper
“Alignment with a structure featuring a covalently trapped substrate (PDB 148L) reveals that the active site cleft is well formed with the key catalytic residue Glu15 (Glu 11 in T4L) and key substrate binding residue Thr30 (Thr26 in T4L) correctly positioned.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“These likelihoods showed a significant drop in AUC of 0.18 for CM (p<0.0001, two-tailed test, n=1617) and 0.08 for MDH (p<0.1, two-tailed test, n=56), as compared to fine-tuned ProGen when predicting if an artificial sequence should function.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“On MDH function data, ProGen log-likelihoods had an AUC of 0.94 (Fig. 4f), which was better than ProteinGAN discriminator scores, with an AUC of 0.87 (p<0.1, two-tailed test, n=56).”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [66] Vig, J. et al. BERTology meets biology: Interpreting attention in protein language models. In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR, 2020). source
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“On CM function data, ProGen log-likelihoods had an area under the curve (AUC) of 0.85, significantly better (p<0.0001, two-tailed test, n=1617) than bmDCA, which had an AUC of 0.78 (Fig. 4c).”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [7] Russ, W. P. et al. An evolution-based model for designing chorismate mutase enzymes. Science 369, 440–445 (2020). source
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In the paper
“We purified 6 highly expressed proteins and found that they were all active, but with significantly lower Michaelis-Menten activities than HEWL or the previously generated artificial proteins L056 and L070 (Fig 3f).”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“Of the selected sequences, 78 out of the 89 (88%) expressed well and 24 out of the 78 (31%) were soluble (Supplemental Figure 8).”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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“L013 and L038 expressed highly to inclusion bodies.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > E. coli Expression of Lysozyme Variants
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“For lowID lysozyme A5 the above protocol was altered slightly to accommodate lower catalytic activity of these variants: reaction volumes were increased to 20 μL, plate was covered with an optically transparent seal (Microseal ® ‘B’ seal; BioRad) to mitigate sample evaporation, fluorescent reads were taken every 5 mins for 16 hours with 5 s of linear plate shaking prior to each measurement to min”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Michaelis-Menten kinetics of lysozyme variants using fluorescein-labeled M. lysodeikticus cell wall
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In the paper
“The MDH functional labels are binary, so no thresholding was needed to compute AUCs.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Evaluating ProGen on Other Protein Systems
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“The resultant data were not described by a single exponential model but were described by a double exponential model (Eq. 6), likely due to the heterogeneity of the substrate, and all data were fit in IgorPro7.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Lysozyme kcat/KM extrapolation from pseudo first-order kinetic data
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“For induced cultures of L056 and L070, significant turbidity was observed in the spent media after cells were pelleted at 3,500 r.c.f. for 30 mins at 4°C.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > E. coli Expression of Lysozyme Variants
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In the paper
“Two peaks were resolved for each variant and that harbored lysozyme activity against the fluorescein-labeled M. Lysodeikticus cell wall substrate (EnzChek kit; ThermoFisher).”
- Also stated in: § Purification of L056 and L070 from spent media · plain
“Two peaks were resolved for each variant and that harbored lysozyme activity against the fluorescein-labeled M. Lysodeikticus cell wall substrate (EnzChek kit; ThermoFisher) that corresponded to peaks observed in the first pool purification.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Purification of L056 and L070 from spent media
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In the paper
“Significant translational non-crystallographic symmetry and differences with the search model resulted in maps that were initially hard to interpret.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Crystallization and structure determination of L056
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In the paper
“These results indicate that ProGen generates protein sequences that not only can express well but also maintain enzymatic function for diverse sequence landscapes across protein families.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
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- Rests on an assumption: Well-expression and solubility in the cell-free system indicate that the artificial proteins are structurally well-folded.
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In the paper
“Taken together, L056 and L070 harbor potent catalytic activity and bactericidal capabilities that are comparable to HEWL, while diverging from their nearest known natural sequence by 53 and 18 amino acids respectively.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
plaincorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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- Rests on an assumption: HEWL is a suitable reference for native lysozyme catalytic activity.
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“The perplexity on a held-out test set was monitored and did not exceed training set perplexity throughout model training.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > ProGen Training
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In the paper
“While we do not expect our language model to generate proteins that belong to a completely different distribution or domain (for example creating a new fold that catalyzes an unnatural reaction), it can significantly expand the space of protein sequences from those sampled by evolution.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
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It may state two separate claims as one.
- Rests on an assumption: The 280 million-sequence training set is diverse enough to learn a universal protein representation transferable across families.
What the paper did — it cites no source for this, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“The aggregated dataset was split into a training set of size 280 million and two test sets, an out-of-distribution test set (OOD-test) of size 100k from 20 protein families and a randomly sampled in-domain test set (ID-test) of size 1 million, that were held-out for training and used for evaluation.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Training Data Curation
plainn = 20- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. It may state two separate claims as one.
None of the sources cited for this claim have been checked yet.
In the paper
“In sum, ProGen’s model likelihoods are better aligned with experimentally-measured assay data on two diverse protein datasets—chorismate mutase and malate dehydrogenase—than the sequence generation methods from original studies specifically tailored for these families.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [7] Russ, W. P. et al. An evolution-based model for designing chorismate mutase enzymes. Science 369, 440–445 (2020). source
- Not checked yetcites [66] Vig, J. et al. BERTology meets biology: Interpreting attention in protein language models. In International Conference on Learning Representations (ICLR, 2020). source
plaincorrelationaln = 1,617- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“These results indicate that both components of our training strategy—initial training on the universal sequence dataset and fine-tuning on the protein family of interest—contribute significantly to final model performance.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
hedgeddirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
It may state two separate claims as one.
What the paper did — it cites no source for this, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“For robustness, we trained three discriminators using different random seeds.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Lysozyme Sequence Selection
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
What the paper did — it cites no source for this, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“Proteins that generated fluorescence one standard deviation above the maximum fluorescence of any negative control were considered functional.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim.
A conclusion the paper draws from its own results — it cites no other source for it, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“The resultant data were not described by a single exponential model but were described by a double exponential model (Eq. 6), likely due to the heterogeneity of the substrate, and all data were fit in IgorPro7.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Lysozyme kcat/KM extrapolation from pseudo first-order kinetic data
hedgedconditional- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Rests on an assumption: The average molecular weight of the fluorescein-labeled M. lysodeikticus cell wall substrate is unknown and the substrate is heterogeneous.
What the paper did — it cites no source for this, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“We also ensured that no two generated samples share over 80% identity with each other.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim.
What the paper did — it cites no source for this, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“After measuring the AUC of each model for each dataset, we used bootstrapping to compute the statistical significance of the difference in AUC of fine-tuned ProGen vs. the reference method (bmDCA and ProGen ablations for CM, ProteinGAN and ProGen ablations for MDH).”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Evaluating ProGen on Other Protein Systems
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim.
What the paper did — it cites no source for this, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“The fine-tuning dataset was clustered at 80% sequence identity and 10% of the clusters were held-out as a validation set for hyper-parameter optimization and stopping criteria.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Lysozyme Generation
plain- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it. It may state two separate claims as one.
In the paper
“We also applied thresholding at 0.42 norm relative enrichment (r.e.) to obtain binary labels for CM function, which roughly corresponds to the cut-off point between two modes that exist in CM function data, to be used for ROC curves, following the original study7.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > Evaluating ProGen on Other Protein Systems
What the sources say
- Not checked yetcites [7] Russ, W. P. et al. An evolution-based model for designing chorismate mutase enzymes. Science 369, 440–445 (2020). source
hedgedcorrelational- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: fails — The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim. The paper’s conclusions may not depend on it.
What the paper did — it cites no source for this, so there is none to check. The quote shows it is in the paper.
In the paper
“We performed structure prediction without an MSA as input so as to not heavily bias the structure prediction toward a known natural mode.”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
plaindirect- Asserted: passes — The authors put it forward as true.
- Checkable: passes — It can be checked against evidence.
- Load-bearing: passes — The paper’s conclusions depend on it.
- Based: passes — The paper gives a reason why it holds.
Probably not a substantial claim.
The paper relies on this without support.
The five lysozyme families chosen because they lack disulfide bonds can be expressed in high-throughput cell-free systems.
“Within the lysozyme clan, we chose to work with five families that lack disulfide bonds as to be amenable to high-throughput cell-free expression: Phage lysozyme, Pesticin, Glucosaminidase, Glycoside hydrolase, and Transglycosylase.”
The paper relies on this without support.
Well-expression and solubility in the cell-free system indicate that the artificial proteins are structurally well-folded.
“These results indicate that ProGen can generate artificial proteins that are structurally well-folded for proper expression as compared to a batch of natural proteins”
The paper relies on this without support.
The 280 million-sequence training set is diverse enough to learn a universal protein representation transferable across families.
“Trained in this unsupervised manner from a large, varied protein sequence database, ProGen learns a universal, domain-independent representation of proteins that subsumes local and global structure motifs”
The paper relies on this without support.
HEWL is a suitable reference for native lysozyme catalytic activity.
“Hen egg white lysozyme (HEWL), a naturally-evolved exemplar protein, was measured as positive control”
The paper relies on this without support.
Model likelihoods for GANs are intractable.
“Since model likelihoods for GANs are intractable, we used discriminator scores corresponding to the probability at which the ProteinGAN discriminator predicted each sample was real as a ProteinGAN model score for each MDH sequence.”
The paper relies on this without support.
The average molecular weight of the fluorescein-labeled M. lysodeikticus cell wall substrate is unknown and the substrate is heterogeneous.
“(the average molecular weight of the fluorescein-labeled M. Lysodeikticus cell wall substrate was unknown and likely heterogeneous).”
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 source backs part of the claim, not all of it — or backs it for a different population, condition or comparison.
In the citing paper
“synthetic proteins optimized for specific families of lysozymes using ProGen have exhibited catalytic efficiencies comparable to their naturally occurring counterparts with low sequence identity.”
From Large language models (LLMs): survey, technical frameworks, and future challenges (2024) · cites this paper as Madani et al. 2023
Experimental — accuracy not yet measuredThe cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“AI models have already been used to design new CRISPR enzymes,53 functional proteins,128 and even entire prokaryotic genomes.51”
From How to build the virtual cell with artificial intelligence: Priorities and opportunities (2024) · cites this paper as [128]
The cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“The success of LLMs has revolutionized AI learning in natural language and image processing [75] and has been extended into the learning of biological sequence datasets [80].”
From Challenges in AI-driven Biomedical Multimodal Data Fusion and Analysis (2025) · cites this paper as [80]
The cited source says what the claim attributes to it.
In the citing paper
“the ProGen (Madani et al. 2023) language model employs deep learning techniques to produce protein sequences with predefined functionalities.”
From Large language models (LLMs): survey, technical frameworks, and future challenges (2024) · cites this paper as Madani et al. 2023
Self-check
Percentages, sums and reported differences re-computed from the paper’s own numbers.
Each contradiction between two passages listed here was confirmed by an independent check.
Rated minor: it would not touch a result — a value no result rests on, a p-value that stays on the same side of the significance level, or a conflict that is clerical, resolved elsewhere in the paper, or outside its own findings.
In the paper
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Abstract
“a state-of-the-art transformer-based conditional language model trained only with evolutionary sequence data”
§ Large language models generate functional protein sequences across diverse families > Methods > ProGen Training
“The model was initialized with pretrained weights of CTRL28, which was trained on an English language corpus.”
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Metadata
- Authors
- Madani, A., Krause, B., Greene, E. R., Subramanian, S., Mohr, B. P., Holton, J. M., Olmos, J. L., Xiong, C., Sun, Z. Z., Socher, R., Fraser, J. S., & Naik, N.
- Affiliations
- Salesforce (United States) (US)
- University of California, San Francisco (US)
- Howard Hughes Medical Institute (US)
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (US)
- Corresponding author
- Madani, Ali
- Naik, Nikhil
- ORCID
- Venue
- Nature Biotechnology
- Published
- 2023-01-26
- Volume
- 41
- Issue
- 8
- Pages
- 1099-1106
- ISSN
- 0733-222X (ISSN-L)
- 1087-0156
- 1546-1696
- PMC
- PMC10400306
- OpenAlex
- W4318071656
- Cited by
- 1,078
- References
- 80
- Citations by year
- 2026: 314 · 2025: 320 · 2024: 302 · 2023: 141
- FWCI
- 95.97
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- green
- www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov
- Licence
- Locations
- Nature Biotechnology (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (acceptedVersion)
- eScholarship (California Digital Library) (submittedVersion)
- OSTI OAI (U.S. Department of Energy Office of Scientific and Technical Information) (submittedVersion)
- Funders
- U.S. Department of Health & Human Services | National Institutes of Health (GM123159)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Protein Structure and Dynamics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Machine Learning in Bioinformatics
- Life Sciences › Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology › Molecular Biology › Enzyme Catalysis and Immobilization
- Keywords
- large language models, protein sequence generation, protein design, protein families, lysozyme, chorismate mutase, malate dehydrogenase, catalytic efficiency, controllable generation, protein engineering
- MeSH terms
- Amino Acid Sequence, Chorismate Mutase, Estrogens, Conjugated (USP), Language, Proteins
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.
A language model drew the claims from the paper on 2026-10-05, under version 3 of the claim definition (model deepseek-v4.1-flash, prompt extract-v3).
A second model labelled each claim on 2026-10-05 (model jev-1.13-20260917, definition revision gold-guideline-v0.2).
Cited sources are checked with a language model’s help (gpt-6-sol).
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 ›
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