Extending Protein Language Models to a Viral Genomic Scale Using Biologically Induced Sparse Attention

The transformer architecture in deep learning has revolutionized protein sequence analysis. Recent advancements in protein language models have paved the way for significant progress across various domains, including protein function and structure prediction, multiple sequence alignments and mutation effect prediction. A protein language model is commonly trained on individual proteins, ignoring the interdependencies between sequences within a genome. However, biological understanding reveals that protein-protein interactions span entire genomic regions, underscoring the limitations of focusing solely on individual proteins. To address these limitations, we propose a novel approach that extends the context size of transformer models across the entire viral genome. By training on large genomic fragments, our method captures long-range interprotein interactions and encodes protein sequences with integrated information from distant proteins within the same genome, offering substantial benefits in various tasks. Viruses, with their densely packed genomes, minimal intergenic regions, and protein annotation challenges, are ideal candidates for genome-wide learning. We introduce a long-context protein language model, trained on entire viral genomes, leveraging a sparse attention mechanism based on protein-protein interactions. Our semi-supervised approach supports long sequences of up to 61,000 amino acids (aa). Our evaluations demonstrate that the resulting embeddings significantly surpass those generated by single-protein models and outperform alternative large-context architectures that rely on static masking or non-transformer frameworks.