| Summary: | Cells have evolved mechanisms to distribute ~10 billion protein molecules to
subcellular compartments where diverse proteins involved in shared functions must
assemble. Here, we demonstrate that proteins with shared functions share amino
acid sequence codes that guide them to compartment destinations. A protein
language model, ProtGPS, was developed that predicts with high performance the
compartment localization of human proteins excluded from the training set.
ProtGPS successfully guided generation of novel protein sequences that selectively
assemble in the nucleolus. ProtGPS identified pathological mutations that change
this code and lead to altered subcellular localization of proteins. Our results
indicate that protein sequences contain not only a folding code, but also a
previously unrecognized code governing their distribution to diverse subcellular
compartments.
|
|---|