Global-Context Aware Generative Protein Design

The linear sequence of amino acids determines protein structure and function. Protein design, known as the inverse of protein structure prediction, aims to obtain a novel protein sequence that will fold into the defined structure. Recent works on computational protein design have studied designing sequences for the desired backbone structure with local positional information and achieved competitive performance. However, similar local environments in different backbone structures may result in different amino acids, which indicates the global context of protein structure matters. Thus, we propose the Global-Context Aware generative de novo protein design method (GCA), consisting of local modules and global modules. While local modules focus on relationships between neighbor amino acids, global modules explicitly capture non-local contexts. Experimental results demonstrate that the proposed GCA method achieves state-of-the-art performance on structure-based protein design. Our code and pretrained model have been released on Github¹.