TPS-Flow: Physics-Guided Flow-Based Generative Modeling of Protein Transition Paths.

Abstract

Transition paths between metastable protein states encode both equilibrium structure statistics and dynamical connectivity yet are costly to obtain with molecular dynamics (MD) and remain challenging to emulate with machine learning. Here, we present TPS-Flow, a physics-guided flow-based generative framework for end point-conditioned conformational path sampling between predefined protein states (not equilibrium ensembles). TPS-Flow represents structures as residue-level SE(3) transforms, uses a spatiotemporal gated attention encoder to learn a flow-matching interpolation velocity field from MD trajectories, and incorporates optional energy and structure-aware constraints together with a short physics-based relaxation step. Across a mycobacterial membrane transporter, a monomeric protein, a protein-protein complex, and a soluble enzyme, TPS-Flow preserves residue-wise fluctuation patterns with damped amplitudes and occupies TICA-projected conformational corridors consistent with reference MD, provides conformational coverage complementary to finite reference MD sampling and generates intermediates with reference-comparable docking scores while reducing model size and computational cost compared to a state-of-the-art trajectory generator (MDGen). In an out-of-distribution structural generalization test using PN-subdomain mutants, TPS-Flow preserved fold continuity and wild-type-like global RMSF patterns when conditioned on AF3-derived mutant end point structures, thereby bridging atomistic simulation and deep generative modeling of protein transition paths.