ProDualNet: dual-target protein sequence design method based on protein language model and structure model

Proteins typically interact with multiple partners to regulate biological processes, and peptide drugs targeting multiple receptors have shown strong therapeutic potential, emphasizing the need for multi-target strategies in protein design. However, most current protein sequence design methods focus on interactions with a single receptor, often neglecting the complexity of designing proteins that can bind to two distinct receptors. We introduced Protein Dual-Target Design Network (ProDualNet), a structure-based sequence design method that integrates sequence-structure information from two receptors to design dual-target protein sequences. ProDualNet used a heterogeneous graph network for pretraining and combines noise-augmented single-target data with real dual-target data for fine-tuning. This approach addressed the challenge of limited dual-target protein experimental structures. The efficacy of ProDualNet has been validated across multiple test sets, demonstrating better recovery and success rates compared to other multi-state design methods. In silico evaluation of cases like dual-target allosteric binding and non-overlapping interface binding highlights its potential for designing dual-target binding proteins. Data and code are available at https://github.com/chengliu97/ProDualNet.