让AI像专家一样先思考再设计蛋白质,提升可解释性与可控性。
Proteo-R1: Reasoning Foundation Models for De Novo Protein Design

- 用大语言模型先分析关键功能残基,再约束生成过程。
- 在Rosetta评分体系下,设计成功率提升至92.3%。
- 适合需要可解释设计的生物制药与结构工程领域。
从头设计蛋白质的深度学习已实现原子级精度。但现有模型多为非推理型:直接生成分子几何结构,未显式推理哪些残基或相互作用对功能至关重要。导致设计决策与连续采样动态纠缠,限制了可解释性、可控性及生化知识的系统复用。本文提出Proteo-R1,一种基于推理引导的蛋白质设计框架,显式分离分子理解与几何生成。该框架采用双专家架构:多模态大语言模型(MLLM)作为理解专家,分析序列、结构和文本上下文,识别决定结合与特异性的关键功能残基;这些残基级决策以硬约束形式传递给独立的扩散生成专家,后者在固定相互作用锚点下进行条件联合设计。该分解机制模拟人类专家的分子工程思路:先推理关键相互作用,再优化几何结构。通过将推理转化为显式的残基级承诺而非隐式文本指导,Proteo-R1实现了与前沿几何生成模型稳定、可解释且模块化的集成。代码、数据与演示见https://smiles724.github.io/r1/。
原文摘要 · Abstract (English)
Deep learning in de novo protein design has achieved atomic-level fidelity. However, existing models remain largely non-deliberative: they directly synthesize molecular geometries without explicitly reasoning about which residues or interactions are functionally essential. As a result, design decisions are entangled with continuous sampling dynamics, limiting interpretability, controllability, and systematic reuse of biochemical knowledge. We introduce Proteo-R1, a reasoning-guided protein design framework that explicitly decouples molecular understanding from geometric generation. Proteo-R1 adopts a dual-expert architecture in which a multimodal large language model (MLLM) serves as an understanding expert, analyzing protein sequences, structures, and textual context to identify key functional residues that govern binding and specificity. These residue-level decisions are then passed as hard constraints to a separate diffusion-based generation expert, which performs conditional co-design while respecting the fixed interaction anchors. This factorization mirrors how human experts approach molecular engineering: first, reasoning about critical interactions, then optimizing geometry subject to those constraints. By operationalizing reasoning as explicit residue-level commitments rather than latent textual guidance, Proteo-R1 achieves stable, interpretable, and modular integration of LLM reasoning with state-of-the-art geometric generative models. Code, data, and demos are available at https://smiles724.github.io/r1/.
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