FlowPacker: protein side-chain packing with torsional flow matching

Bioinformatics. 2025 Mar 4;41(3):btaf010. doi: 10.1093/bioinformatics/btaf010.

Abstract

Motivation: Accurate prediction of protein side-chain conformations is necessary to understand protein folding, protein-protein interactions and facilitate de novo protein design.

Results: Here, we apply torsional flow matching and equivariant graph attention to develop FlowPacker, a fast and performant model to predict protein side-chain conformations conditioned on the protein sequence and backbone. We show that FlowPacker outperforms previous state-of-the-art baselines across most metrics with improved runtime. We further show that FlowPacker can be used to inpaint missing side-chain coordinates and also for multimeric targets, and exhibits strong performance on a test set of antibody-antigen complexes.

Availability and implementation: Code is available at https://gitlab.com/mjslee0921/flowpacker.

MeSH terms

  • Algorithms
  • Models, Molecular
  • Protein Conformation
  • Protein Folding
  • Proteins* / chemistry
  • Software*

Substances

  • Proteins