English

Predicting a Protein's Stability under a Million Mutations

Biomolecules 2023-11-01 v2

Abstract

Stabilizing proteins is a foundational step in protein engineering. However, the evolutionary pressure of all extant proteins makes identifying the scarce number of mutations that will improve thermodynamic stability challenging. Deep learning has recently emerged as a powerful tool for identifying promising mutations. Existing approaches, however, are computationally expensive, as the number of model inferences scales with the number of mutations queried. Our main contribution is a simple, parallel decoding algorithm. Our Mutate Everything is capable of predicting the effect of all single and double mutations in one forward pass. It is even versatile enough to predict higher-order mutations with minimal computational overhead. We build Mutate Everything on top of ESM2 and AlphaFold, neither of which were trained to predict thermodynamic stability. We trained on the Mega-Scale cDNA proteolysis dataset and achieved state-of-the-art performance on single and higher-order mutations on S669, ProTherm, and ProteinGym datasets. Code is available at https://github.com/jozhang97/MutateEverything

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2310.12979,
  title  = {Predicting a Protein's Stability under a Million Mutations},
  author = {Jeffrey Ouyang-Zhang and Daniel J. Diaz and Adam R. Klivans and Philipp Krähenbühl},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2310.12979},
  year   = {2023}
}

Comments

NeurIPS 2023. Code available at https://github.com/jozhang97/MutateEverything

R2 v1 2026-06-28T12:55:57.139Z