Solubility-aware protein binding peptide design using AlphaFold

Abstract New protein–protein interactions (PPIs) are being identified, but PPIs have different physicochemical properties compared with conventional targets, making it difficult to use small molecules. Peptides offer a new modality to target PPIs, but designing appropriate peptide sequences by computation is challenging. Recently, AlphaFold and RosettaFold have made it possible to predict protein structures from amino acid sequences with ultra-high accuracy, enabling de novo protein design. We designed peptides likely to have PPI as the target protein using the “binder hallucination” protocol of AfDesign, a de novo protein design method using AlphaFold. However, the solubility of the peptides tended to be low. Therefore, we designed a solubility loss function using solubility indices for amino acids and developed a solubility-aware AfDesign binder hallucination protocol. The peptide solubility in sequences designed using the new protocol increased with the weight of the solubility loss function; moreover, they captured the characteristics of the solubility indices. Moreover, the new protocol sequences tended to have higher affinity than random or single residue substitution sequences when evaluated by docking binding affinity. Our approach shows that it is possible to design peptide sequences that can bind to the interface of PPI while controlling solubility.