AI-Designed Proteases for Targeted Protein Cleavage

The researchers demonstrated the effectiveness of the designed enzymes by using them to cut proteins associated with neurological diseases.

The design process started with software called RFdiffusion2 and was followed by ProteinMPNN.

For the cysteine protease, they made 12 different backbones, and populated them with 69 different sets of amino acids.

For the zinc project, they tried 135 different protein designs.