Computational scoring and experimental evaluation of enzymes generated by neural networks

In recent years, generative protein sequence models have been developed to sample novel sequences. However, predicting whether generated proteins will fold and function remains challenging. We evaluate a set of 20 diverse computational metrics to assess the quality of enzyme sequences produced by three contrasting generative models: ancestral sequence reconstruction, a generative adversarial network and a protein language model. Focusing on two enzyme families, we expressed and purified over 500 natural and generated sequences with 70–90% identity to the most similar natural sequences to benchmark computational metrics for predicting in vitro enzyme activity. Over three rounds of experiments, we developed a computational filter that improved the rate of experimental success by 50–150%. The proposed metrics and models will drive protein engineering research by serving as a benchmark for generative protein sequence models and helping to select active variants for experimental testing.