Next invited talk:

Guangshuo Ou

School of Life Sciences, Tsinghua University, China

Decoding the protein language: ProtWord-guided discovery and design of cytoskeletal regulators

I will present ProtWord, a protein language framework that represents proteins as sequences of learned multi-residue “words.” ProtWord enables functional discovery beyond sequence and structure similarity and allows systematic annotation of uncharacterized proteins. I will show how this approach led to the discovery of ADMAP1, a new microtubule-associated protein essential for sperm motility, and how the framework can be used to design functional proteins such as cytoskeleton-binding proteins that stabilize the cytoskeleton. Together, these results illustrate how protein language models unify biological discovery and protein engineering.