De novo design of luciferases using deep learning

https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-023-05696-3

by bglazer • 3 years ago

3 1 3 years ago

bglazer• 3 years ago

Luciferases are proteins that catalyze light emitting reactions. Fireflies are the most well known example, but they occur in a wide variety of forms across the tree of life.

They’re also spectacularly useful in biological research. A common use is to engineer a luciferase into a genome so that it is expressed in conjunction with a particular protein that you’re interested in. Then by measuring light emitted by the luciferase, you get an indirect measure of the level of the target protein.

The problem is that only a few luciferases are available to researchers, and they can be finicky in mammalian cells. This research seeks to expand the variety of luciferases by designing them from scratch a variety of computational tools including deep learning as a key component. They show that one of their novel, artificial luciferases is just as efficient as a natural one, but binds more to its target and less to other molecules.

Pretty wild application of machine learning to design really complex protein structures. Its a small step towards truly synthetic biology, i.e. proteins designed to do new, useful reactions.

De novo design of luciferases using deep learning

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