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AlphaFold as a prior: experimental structure determination conditioned on a pretrained neural network
Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom; Department of Systems Biology, Columbia University, NY, New York, United States.
John A. Paulson School of Engineering and Applied Sciences, Harvard University, MA, Cambridge, United States; Center for Computational Mathematics, Flatiron Institute, NY, New York, United States.
Cambridge Institute for Medical Research, University of Cambridge, Cambridge, United Kingdom.
Umeå University, Faculty of Science and Technology, Department of Chemistry.
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2026 (English)In: Nature Methods, ISSN 1548-7091, E-ISSN 1548-7105, Vol. 23, no 4, p. 785-795Article in journal (Refereed) Published
Abstract [en]

Advances in machine learning have transformed structural biology, enabling swift and accurate prediction of protein structure from sequence. However, key challenges persist in modeling side-chain packing, condition-dependent conformational changes and biomolecular interactions, largely because of limited high-quality training data. At the same time, emerging experimental techniques such as cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM), cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) and high-throughput crystallography are generating vast amounts of structural information but converting these data into mechanistically interpretable atomic models often remains difficult. Here we show that integrating experimental measurements directly into protein structure prediction can overcome these limitations. We introduce ROCKET, an augmentation of AlphaFold2 that refines predicted structures using cryo-EM, cryo-ET and X-ray crystallography data. By optimizing structures in the space of coevolutionary embeddings rather than Cartesian coordinates, ROCKET captures biologically meaningful structural variation that is inaccessible to AlphaFold2 alone and to existing automated modeling approaches, especially when the signal-to-noise ratio is low. ROCKET enables scalable, automated model building without retraining and provides a general framework for integrating experimental observables with biomolecular machine learning.

Place, publisher, year, edition, pages
Springer Nature, 2026. Vol. 23, no 4, p. 785-795
National Category
Structural Biology Biochemistry Molecular Biology
Identifiers
URN: urn:nbn:se:umu:diva-252197DOI: 10.1038/s41592-026-03047-4ISI: 001730549200001PubMedID: 41922571Scopus ID: 2-s2.0-105034805372OAI: oai:DiVA.org:umu-252197DiVA, id: diva2:2056069
Funder
Wellcome trust, 209407/Z/17/ZNIH (National Institutes of Health)Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, 2018.0042Swedish Research Council, 2024-05336Available from: 2026-04-28 Created: 2026-04-28 Last updated: 2026-04-28Bibliographically approved

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Banjara, Suresh

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