Proteins are complex biomolecules that perform a variety of crucial functions
within living organisms. Designing and generating novel proteins can pave the
way for many future synthetic biology applications, including drug discovery.
However, it remains a challenging computational task due to the large modeling
space of protein structures. In this study, we propose a latent diffusion model
that can reduce the complexity of protein modeling while flexibly capturing the
distribution of natural protein structures in a condensed latent space.
Specifically, we propose an equivariant protein autoencoder that embeds
proteins into a latent space and then uses an equivariant diffusion model to
learn the distribution of the latent protein representations. Experimental
results demonstrate that our method can effectively generate novel protein
backbone structures with high designability and efficiency.

本研究提出了一种潜在的扩散模型，该模型可以在凝聚的潜在空间中灵活捕捉天然蛋白质结构的分布，从而通过等变蛋白自编码器生成高可设计性和高效率的新型蛋白质骨架结构。