Repurposing protein folding models for generation with latent diffusion

PLAID is a multimodal generative model that simultaneously generates protein 1D sequence and 3D structure, by learning the latent space of protein folding models. What comes next after protein folding? In PLAID, we develop a method that learns to sample from the latent space of protein folding models to generate new proteins. It can accept compositional function and organism prompts, and can be trained on sequence databases, which are 2-4 orders of magnitude larger than structure databases. Unlike many previous protein structure generative models, PLAID addresses the multimodal co-generation problem setting: simultaneously generating both discrete sequence and continuous all-atom structural coordinates.