Peptide binder design with inverse folding and protein structure prediction

The computational design of peptide binders towards a specific protein interface can aid diagnostic and therapeutic efforts. Here, we design peptide binders by combining the known structural space searched with Foldseek, the protein design method ESM-IF1, and AlphaFold2 (AF) in a joint framework. Foldseek generates backbone seeds for a modified version of ESM-IF1 adapted to protein complexes. The resulting sequences are evaluated with AF using an MSA representation for the receptor structure and a single sequence for the binder. We show that AF can accurately evaluate protein binders and that our bind score can select these (ROC AUC = 0.96 for the heterodimeric case). We find that designs created from seeds with more contacts per residue are more successful and tend to be short. There is a relationship between the sequence recovery in interface positions and the plDDT of the designs, where designs with ≥80% recovery have an average plDDT of 84 compared to 55 at 0%. Designed sequences have 60% higher median plDDT values towards intended receptors than non-intended ones. Successful binders (predicted interface RMSD ≤ 2 Å) are designed towards 185 (6.5%) heteromeric and 42 (3.6%) homomeric protein interfaces with ESM-IF1 compared with 18 (1.5%) using ProteinMPNN from 100 samples.