I know this is exciting (and it is) but just to temper the excitement: many computationally designed proteins have issues.

Most aren’t that good at working in in-Vivo conditions

We still can’t really adjust parameters we really want (like temperature these proteins work in)

Most are stuck on “simpler” problems like binding rather than enzymatic function

There may also be issues with evolvability of these enzymes

But all the same, it’s not an unnatural situation either. Protein sequences are still a sequence. Amino acids are added one by one to build them up, and we’ve known that neural nets are good at these problems. Before we solved tertiary structure prediction, secondary structure prediction sota was also neural networks. It’s just tertiary structure and these kinds of generative models are hard.

We’re finally cracking into generative protein design and the field is super exciting now, but it’s still only really preliminary results we’re seeing.