Protein Language Models Decoded by MIT Researchers

Recently, a team of researchers at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, investigated the inner workings of protein language models (pLMs) to understand how they predict protein structure and function.

• Their findings were published in the study titled, ‘Sparse autoencoders uncover biologically interpretable features in protein language model representations’.
• pLMs are specialized large language models trained on protein sequences rather than words, learning patterns in amino acid arrangements that determine a protein’s three-dimensional structure and function.
• This helps scientists design drugs and vaccines more efficiently by predicting how changes in protein sequences affect folding and activity.
• By applying this technique, researchers could map what ....