Paper ID: 2305.19800

RINGER: Rapid Conformer Generation for Macrocycles with Sequence-Conditioned Internal Coordinate Diffusion

Colin A. Grambow, Hayley Weir, Nathaniel L. Diamant, Alex M. Tseng, Tommaso Biancalani, Gabriele Scalia, Kangway V. Chuang

Macrocyclic peptides are an emerging therapeutic modality, yet computational approaches for accurately sampling their diverse 3D ensembles remain challenging due to their conformational diversity and geometric constraints. Here, we introduce RINGER, a diffusion-based transformer model for sequence-conditioned generation of macrocycle structures based on internal coordinates. RINGER provides fast backbone sampling while respecting key structural invariances of cyclic peptides. Through extensive benchmarking and analysis against gold-standard conformer ensembles of cyclic peptides generated with metadynamics, we demonstrate how RINGER generates both high-quality and diverse geometries at a fraction of the computational cost. Our work lays the foundation for improved sampling of cyclic geometries and the development of geometric learning methods for peptides.

Submitted: May 30, 2023