Making high-performance proteins for medicines or consumer products can take trial after trial of tweaks, experiments and fine-tuning. A new machine learning framework squeezes all that into a single round of testing.
The technique, called MULTI-evolve, predicts how proteins will behave when several of their amino acids are swapped for others. MULTI-evolve blends laboratory experiments with machine learning to find these upgraded proteins, researchers report February 19 in Science.
Specially-crafted proteins play a role in everyday products like medicines, biofuels and even laundry detergent. Scientists usually need to swap out multiple amino acids during the design process to boost a protein’s performance. But replacing one amino acid with another