🔴 Proteins Never Existed in Nature: Artificial Intelligence Opens a New Frontier

Artificial intelligence has learned to design proteins that don't necessarily have to resemble those created by nature. Researchers have developed the PottsMPNN system , which searches for appropriate amino acid sequences for a given structure while not attempting to reproduce known natural proteins with the utmost precision. This approach opens up a much broader scope for the creation of molecules with novel properties.

Modern protein design works largely in the opposite direction to the famous AlphaFold. AlphaFold receives a sequence of amino acids and attempts to determine the three-dimensional structure the protein will assume. When creating a new protein, researchers can first imagine the required structure and then select an amino acid sequence capable of stably folding into it.