In the hunt for new therapeutics for cancer and infectious diseases, lasso peptides prove to be a catch. Their knot-like structures afford these molecules high stability and diverse biological activities, making them a promising avenue for new therapeutics. To better unleash their clinical potential, a team from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology developed LassoESM, a new large language model for predicting lasso peptide properties.
The collaborative study was recently published in Nature Communications.
Lasso peptides are natural products made by bacteria. To produce these peptides, bacteria use ribosomes to build chains of amino acids that are then folded by biosynthetic enzymes into a unique slip knot-like structure. Through this process, thousands of different lasso peptides are generated, many of which have demonstrated antibacterial, antiviral, and anticancer properties.
“There are striking opportunities to use lasso peptides in drug discovery, from targeting receptors to developing stable oral therapeutics,’ said Doug Mitchell, the Director of the Vanderbilt Institute for Chemical Biology and co-leader of the study. “By building a dedicated language model for these molecules, we’ve created a tool that helps us unlock these possibilities far more efficiently.”
Read the full story from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.