arXiv:2602. 24007v3 Announce Type: replace-cross Abstract: Protein function relies on dynamic conformational ensembles, yet current generative models like AlphaFold3 often fail to produce ensembles that match experimental data.
By Advaith Maddipatla, Anar Rzayev, Marco Pegoraro, Martin Pacesa, Paul Schanda, Ailie Marx, Sanketh Vedula, Alex M. Bronstein
TorchCraft is a unified binder‑design framework that optimizes sequence logits using a frozen all‑atom structure predictor. It integrates confidence, contact, geometric, and sequence‑prior objectives within TorchFold to design minibinders, framework‑conditioned VHHs, cyclic peptides, and ligand‑binding proteins. Using pretrained AlphaFold 3 weights, TorchCraft produced experimentally validated binders across four targets without post‑hoc redesign, and computational tests confirmed its applicability to cyclic peptides and ligand‑conditioned pocket design.
By TorchCraft Team, Yu Liu, Zhouhanyu Shen, Zhengyi Li, Xikun Huang, Jiaqi Liu, Shuxian Gao, Qilin Yu, Xiayan Qin, Yucheng Zhang, Mingchen Chen
The paper introduces two closed‑form projection operators that enforce physical validity in biomolecular diffusion models during inference. One operator resolves inter‑chain van der Waals clashes, while the other restores ligand geometry, including bond lengths, angles, planarity, and chirality. These lightweight, model‑agnostic corrections preserve structural accuracy and ligand placement across multiple benchmarks without adding runtime or memory overhead.
By Qurat-ul-ain, Yee Whye Teh, Charlotte M. Deane, Matteo Cagiada
CODesign is a co-design framework that jointly generates protein sequences and structures to improve consistency between them. It introduces a large consistency‑distilled dataset of about 105,000 dimers and employs a multimodal joint flow model with a consistency‑aware resampling strategy to iteratively refine sequences and side chains. The approach achieves state‑of‑the‑art in silico success rates for protein‑ and ligand‑target binder design, with ablation studies showing a 70.9% performance boost from the distilled dataset and further gains from the resampling mechanism.
By Yuanle Mo, Bo Qiang, Haitao Lin, Qinghan Wang, Gang Du, Odin Zhang, Pheng Ann Heng
Blitz is a few‑step distillation framework that accelerates diffusion‑based protein structure prediction models by reducing denoising steps from 200 to eight. It employs a geometric noise schedule, multistep consistency training, physical steering, and target‑free candidate selection to maintain high structural accuracy. Applied to AlphaFold 3 and Boltz‑2, Blitz matches teacher‑level accuracy and outperforms other few‑step baselines across multiple evaluation metrics.
By Vinay Saji Mathew, Soundar Kumara, Gretta Kellogg, William K. M. Lai
The paper introduces MCTH (Monte Carlo Tree Hallucination), an inference-only framework that performs all‑atom biomolecular sequence‑structure co‑design by treating pretrained folding and inverse‑folding models as black‑box operators. MCTH uses Monte Carlo Tree Search to allocate a fixed inference budget across competing design trajectories, incorporating model confidence, uncertainty, and cross‑expert consensus. Experiments across protein‑RNA, protein‑DNA, protein‑protein, and protein‑ligand design show that adaptive search outperforms simpler sampling strategies, and evaluations with AlphaFold3 and Chai‑1 demonstrate transferability beyond the search‑time oracle.
By Xuefeng Liu, Mingxuan Cao, Xiao Luo, Songhao Jiang, Tobin Sosnick, Jinbo Xu, Louis Maher, Rick Stevens