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Evolutionary-scale prediction of atomic-level protein structure with a language model

2023/03/16 by Zeming Lin, Halil Akin, Roshan Rao +12 · 269 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Machine Learning in Bioinformatics #RNA and protein synthesis mechanisms

paper · doi:10.1126/science.ade2574

openalex publication_date 2023/03/16 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/30

Abstract

Recent advances in machine learning have leveraged evolutionary information in multiple sequence alignments to predict protein structure. We demonstrate direct inference of full atomic-level protein structure from primary sequence using a large language model. As language models of protein sequences are scaled up to 15 billion parameters, an atomic-resolution picture of protein structure emerges in the learned representations. This results in an order-of-magnitude acceleration of high-resolution structure prediction, which enables large-scale structural characterization of metagenomic proteins. We apply this capability to construct the ESM Metagenomic Atlas by predicting structures for >617 million metagenomic protein sequences, including >225 million that are predicted with high confidence, which gives a view into the vast breadth and diversity of natural proteins.

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