Representation choice shapes the interpretation of protein conformational dynamics

Modern protein representation models support tasks such as enzyme design and drug discovery, but their reliance on static data such as sequence and native structure limits their ability to capture the conformational dynamics that drive protein function. We investigate whether persistent homology (PH) can provide descriptors shared across diverse proteins that retain global structure, fine-grained conformational variability, and kinetically relevant information without large-scale pretraining. We introduce the masked Flood complex, i.e., an adaptation of a recently proposed simplicial complex construction, that incorporates domain knowledge to emphasize inter-residue structure at low computational cost. We then use it to compute PH on molecular dynamics (MD) sampled structures, vectorize the persistence diagrams into a shared coordinate system, and probe the capacity of these representations in terms of the aforementioned aspects. To assess the amount of kinetic information, we learn low-dimensional embeddings from time-lagged observations and evaluate Markov state models (MSMs) estimated from them. Using these MSMs to guide training of the recent marsfm generative framework improves several ensemble statistics relative to the original model. After finetuning on lower-temperature MD data and adapting the sampling procedure, the resulting model also shows promising transfer to fast folding proteins.

Protein dynamics underlie many biological functions, yet remain difficult to characterize due to the high computational cost of molecular dynamics simulations and the scarcity of dynamic structural data. This survey reviews recent advances in artificial intelligence for protein dynamics from three perspectives: learning from structural ensembles and trajectories, learning from physical energy signals, and learning to accelerate molecular simulations. We summarize representative methods for conformation ensemble generation, trajectory generation, Boltzmann generators, physics-aware adaptation, machine learning potentials, coarse-grained modeling, and collective variable discovery. We further discuss available datasets and key open challenges, such as scalability, thermodynamic consistency, kinetic fidelity, and integration with experimental constraints.

Intrinsically disordered proteins (IDPs) carry out their functions through heterogeneous conformational ensembles that reflect their dynamics, yet most protein function prediction methods rely on sequence or a single static structure. To this end, we introduce DynaReason-Pro, the first framework to jointly predict GO terms from conformational ensembles and generate natural-language functional rationales. We evaluate DynaReason-Pro on a curated IDP benchmark from the Protein Ensemble Database (PED), with sequence- and structure-cluster-disjoint splits to prevent data leakage. Variability-stratified evaluation shows the clearest gains in the high-conformational-variability regime.