An All-Atom Generative Model for Designing Protein Complexes
1. APM (All-Atom Protein Generative Model) is a novel generative framework specifically designed to model, fold, and generate multi-chain protein complexes at all-atom resolution—an area long underserved by traditional single-chain models.
2. Unlike methods that rely on pseudo-sequence linking for multi-chain modeling, APM handles native multi-chain structures through architecture and data-level innovations, allowing precise modeling of inter-chain interactions.
3. APM integrates a three-module pipeline: (1) Seq&BB module for co-generating backbone and sequence via flow matching, (2) Sidechain module to generate full-atom sidechain conformations, and (3) Refine module to optimize structures with all-atom awareness.
4. To maintain sequence-structure coherence during generation, APM employs a novel decoupled noising and two-phase training strategy, enabling high-fidelity reconstruction across both modalities.
5. Benchmarks on single-chain tasks show APM performs competitively with leading models like ESM3 and ESMFold, and outperforms MultiFlow and ProteinGenerator on inverse folding and structure generation across various protein lengths.
6. APM is one of the first generative models to demonstrate reliable folding and inverse folding on multi-chain proteins without MSA, outperforming Boltz-1 (noMSA) and achieving high amino acid recovery and scTM scores.
7. In de novo complex generation, APM achieves significantly stronger binding energies and lower RMSD compared to Chroma, validating its ability to design well-packed interfaces using all-atom features.
8. APM’s chain-by-chain conditional generation offers controllable complex formation, supporting flexible design strategies where chains fold independently and bind cooperatively.
9. On downstream applications, APM achieves state-of-the-art performance in antibody CDR-H3 co-design (RAbD benchmark) and targeted peptide design (LNR dataset), surpassing specialized models like dyMEAN, DiffAb, and PepGLAD in binding affinity and structure quality.
10. By explicitly modeling all-atom details, natively handling multi-chain systems, and supporting both zero-shot and fine-tuned design tasks, APM paves the way for next-generation protein complex design with broad applications in therapeutic development.
💻Code:
github.com/bytedance/apm
📜Paper:
arxiv.org/abs/2504.13075
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