AAVDiff: Experimental Validation of Enhanced Viability and Diversity in Recombinant Adeno-Associated Virus (AAV) Capsids through Diffusion Generation

Recombinant adeno-associated virus (rAAV) vectors have revolutionized gene therapy, but their broad tropism and suboptimal transduction efficiency limit their clinical applications. To overcome these limitations, researchers have focused on designing and screening capsid libraries to identify improved vectors. However, the large sequence space and limited resources present challenges in identifying viable capsid variants. In this study, we propose an end-to-end diffusion model to generate capsid sequences with enhanced viability. Using publicly available AAV2 data, we generated 38,000 diverse AAV2 viral protein (VP) sequences, and evaluated 8,000 for viral selection. The results attested the superiority of our model compared to traditional methods. Additionally, in the absence of AAV9 capsid data, apart from one wild-type sequence, we used the same model to directly generate a number of viable sequences with up to 9 mutations. we transferred the remaining 30,000 samples to the AAV9 domain. Furthermore, we conducted mutagenesis on AAV9 VP hypervariable regions VI and V, contributing to the continuous improvement of the AAV9 VP sequence. This research represents a significant advancement in the design and functional validation of rAAV vectors, offering innovative solutions to enhance specificity and transduction efficiency in gene therapy applications.

Generative AI for Controllable Protein Sequence Design: A Survey

The design of novel protein sequences with targeted functionalities underpins a central theme in protein engineering, impacting diverse fields such as drug discovery and enzymatic engineering. However, navigating this vast combinatorial search space remains a severe challenge due to time and financial constraints. This scenario is rapidly evolving as the transformative advancements in AI, particularly in the realm of generative models and optimization algorithms, have been propelling the protein design field towards an unprecedented revolution. In this survey, we systematically review recent advances in generative AI for controllable protein sequence design. To set the stage, we first outline the foundational tasks in protein sequence design in terms of the constraints involved and present key generative models and optimization algorithms. We then offer in-depth reviews of each design task and discuss the pertinent applications. Finally, we identify the unresolved challenges and highlight research opportunities that merit deeper exploration.

Multiscale Topology in Interactomic Network: From Transcriptome to Antiaddiction Drug Repurposing

The escalating drug addiction crisis in the United States underscores the urgent need for innovative therapeutic strategies. This study embarked on an innovative and rigorous strategy to unearth potential drug repurposing candidates for opioid and cocaine addiction treatment, bridging the gap between transcriptomic data analysis and drug discovery. We initiated our approach by conducting differential gene expression analysis on addiction-related transcriptomic data to identify key genes. We propose a novel topological differentiation to identify key genes from a protein-protein interaction (PPI) network derived from DEGs. This method utilizes persistent Laplacians to accurately single out pivotal nodes within the network, conducting this analysis in a multiscale manner to ensure high reliability. Through rigorous literature validation, pathway analysis, and data-availability scrutiny, we identified three pivotal molecular targets, mTOR, mGluR5, and NMDAR, for drug repurposing from DrugBank. We crafted machine learning models employing two natural language processing (NLP)-based embeddings and a traditional 2D fingerprint, which demonstrated robust predictive ability in gauging binding affinities of DrugBank compounds to selected targets. Furthermore, we elucidated the interactions of promising drugs with the targets and evaluated their drug-likeness. This study delineates a multi-faceted and comprehensive analytical framework, amalgamating bioinformatics, topological data analysis and machine learning, for drug repurposing in addiction treatment, setting the stage for subsequent experimental validation. The versatility of the methods we developed allows for applications across a range of diseases and transcriptomic datasets.

From molecules to scaffolds to functional groups: building context-dependent molecular representation via multi-channel learning

Reliable molecular property prediction is essential for various scientific endeavors and industrial applications, such as drug discovery. However, the scarcity of data, combined with the highly non-linear causal relationships between physicochemical and biological properties and conventional molecular featurization schemes, complicates the development of robust molecular machine learning models. Self-supervised learning (SSL) has emerged as a popular solution, utilizing large-scale, unannotated molecular data to learn a foundational representation of chemical space that might be advantageous for downstream tasks. Yet, existing molecular SSL methods largely overlook domain-specific knowledge, such as molecular similarity and scaffold importance, as well as the context of the target application when operating over the large chemical space. This paper introduces a novel learning framework that leverages the knowledge of structural hierarchies within molecular structures, embeds them through separate pre-training tasks over distinct channels, and employs a task-specific channel selection to compose a context-dependent representation. Our approach demonstrates competitive performance across various molecular property benchmarks and establishes some state-of-the-art results. It further offers unprecedented advantages in particularly challenging yet ubiquitous scenarios like activity cliffs with enhanced robustness and generalizability compared to other baselines.

MolHF: A Hierarchical Normalizing Flow for Molecular Graph Generation

Molecular de novo design is a critical yet challenging task in scientific fields, aiming to design novel molecular structures with desired property profiles. Significant progress has been made by resorting to generative models for graphs. However, limited attention is paid to hierarchical generative models, which can exploit the inherent hierarchical structure (with rich semantic information) of the molecular graphs and generate complex molecules of larger size that we shall demonstrate to be difficult for most existing models. The primary challenge to hierarchical generation is the non-differentiable issue caused by the generation of intermediate discrete coarsened graph structures. To sidestep this issue, we cast the tricky hierarchical generation problem over discrete spaces as the reverse process of hierarchical representation learning and propose MolHF, a new hierarchical flow-based model that generates molecular graphs in a coarse-to-fine manner. Specifically, MolHF first generates bonds through a multi-scale architecture, then generates atoms based on the coarsened graph structure at each scale. We demonstrate that MolHF achieves state-of-the-art performance in random generation and property optimization, implying its high capacity to model data distribution. Furthermore, MolHF is the first flow-based model that can be applied to model larger molecules (polymer) with more than 100 heavy atoms. The code and models are available at https://github.com/violet-sto/MolHF.

Sample-efficient Multi-objective Molecular Optimization with GFlowNets

Many crucial scientific problems involve designing novel molecules with desired properties, which can be formulated as an expensive black-box optimization problem over the discrete chemical space. Computational methods have achieved initial success but still struggle with simultaneously optimizing multiple competing properties in a sample-efficient manner. In this work, we propose a multi-objective Bayesian optimization (MOBO) algorithm leveraging the hypernetwork-based GFlowNets (HN-GFN) as an acquisition function optimizer, with the purpose of sampling a diverse batch of candidate molecular graphs from an approximate Pareto front. Using a single preference-conditioned hypernetwork, HN-GFN learns to explore various trade-offs between objectives. Inspired by reinforcement learning, we further propose a hindsight-like off-policy strategy to share high-performing molecules among different preferences in order to speed up learning for HN-GFN. Through synthetic experiments, we illustrate that HN-GFN has adequate capacity to generalize over preferences. Extensive experiments show that our framework outperforms the best baselines by a large margin in terms of hypervolume in various real-world MOBO settings.

Recent advances in artificial intelligence for retrosynthesis

Retrosynthesis is the cornerstone of organic chemistry, providing chemists in material and drug manufacturing access to poorly available and brand-new molecules. Conventional rule-based or expert-based computer-aided synthesis has obvious limitations, such as high labor costs and limited search space. In recent years, dramatic breakthroughs driven by artificial intelligence have revolutionized retrosynthesis. Here we aim to present a comprehensive review of recent advances in AI-based retrosynthesis. For single-step and multi-step retrosynthesis both, we first list their goal and provide a thorough taxonomy of existing methods. Afterwards, we analyze these methods in terms of their mechanism and performance, and introduce popular evaluation metrics for them, in which we also provide a detailed comparison among representative methods on several public datasets. In the next part we introduce popular databases and established platforms for retrosynthesis. Finally, this review concludes with a discussion about promising research directions in this field.

Root-aligned SMILES for Molecular Retrosynthesis Prediction

Retrosynthesis prediction is a fundamental problem in organic synthesis, where the task is to discover precursor molecules that can be used to synthesize a target molecule. A popular paradigm of existing computational retrosynthesis methods formulate retrosynthesis prediction as a sequence-to-sequence translation problem, where the typical SMILES representations are adopted for both reactants and products. However, the general-purpose SMILES neglects the characteristics of retrosynthesis that 1) the search space of the reactants is quite huge, and 2) the molecular graph topology is largely unaltered from products to reactants, resulting in the suboptimal performance of SMILES if straightforwardly applied. In this article, we propose the root-aligned SMILES~(R-SMILES), which specifies a tightly aligned one-to-one mapping between the product and the reactant SMILES, to narrow the string representation discrepancy for more efficient retrosynthesis. As the minimum edit distance between the input and the output is significantly decreased with the proposed R-SMILES, the computational model is largely relieved from learning the complex syntax and dedicated to learning the chemical knowledge for retrosynthesis. We compare the proposed R-SMILES with various state-of-the-art baselines on different benchmarks and show that it significantly outperforms them all, demonstrating the superiority of the proposed method.