Multi-Modal CLIP-Informed Protein Editing

Background: Proteins govern most biological functions essential for life, and achieving controllable protein editing has made great advances in probing natural systems, creating therapeutic conjugates, and generating novel protein constructs. Recently, machine learning-assisted protein editing (MLPE) has shown promise in accelerating optimization cycles and reducing experimental workloads. However, current methods struggle with the vast combinatorial space of potential protein edits and cannot explicitly conduct protein editing using biotext instructions, limiting their interactivity with human feedback. Methods: To fill these gaps, we propose a novel method called ProtET for efficient CLIP-informed protein editing through multi-modality learning. Our approach comprises 2 stages: In the pretraining stage, contrastive learning aligns protein-biotext representations encoded by 2 large language models (LLMs). Subsequently, during the protein editing stage, the fused features from editing instruction texts and original protein sequences serve as the final editing condition for generating target protein sequences. Results: Comprehensive experiments demonstrated the superiority of ProtET in editing proteins to enhance human-expected functionality across multiple attribute domains, including enzyme catalytic activity, protein stability, and antibody-specific binding ability. ProtET improves the state-of-the-art results by a large margin, leading to substantial stability improvements of 16.67% and 16.90%. Conclusions: This capability positions ProtET to advance real-world artificial protein editing, potentially addressing unmet academic, industrial, and clinical needs.