English

Towards a Universal Foundation Model for Protein Dynamics: A Multi-Chain Tree-Structured Framework with Transformer Propagators

Atomic Physics 2026-04-16 v3 Chemical Physics Computational Physics

Abstract

Simulating large-scale protein dynamics using traditional all-atom molecular dynamics (MD) remains computationally prohibitive. We present a unified, universal framework for coarse-grained molecular dynamics (CG-MD) that achieves high-fidelity structural reconstruction and generalizes across diverse protein systems. Central to our approach is a hierarchical, tree-structured protein representation (TSCG) that maps Cartesian coordinates into a minimal set of interpretable collective variables. We extend this representation to accommodate multi-chain assemblies, demonstrating sub-angstrom precision in reconstructing full-atom structures from coarse-grained nodes. To model temporal evolution, we formulate protein dynamics as stochastic differential equations (SDEs), utilizing a Transformer-based architecture as a universal propagator. By representing collective variables as language-like sequences, our model transcends the limitations of protein-specific networks, generalizing to arbitrary sequence lengths and multi-chain configurations. The framework achieves an acceleration of over 10,000 to 20,000 times compared to traditional MD, generating microsecond-long trajectories within minutes. Our results show that the generated trajectories maintain statistical consistency with all-atom MD in RMSD profiles and structural ensembles. This universal model provides a salable solution for high-throughput protein simulation, offering a significant leap toward a foundation model for molecular dynamics.

Keywords

Cite

@article{arxiv.2502.05909,
  title  = {Towards a Universal Foundation Model for Protein Dynamics: A Multi-Chain Tree-Structured Framework with Transformer Propagators},
  author = {Jinzhen Zhu},
  journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2502.05909},
  year   = {2026}
}

Comments

14 pages, 10 figures

R2 v1 2026-06-28T21:37:45.944Z