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Unobserved Sequence Space Has Many Functional Proteins

Nathan Diplock Thomas A. Desautels Riyaz Haque Micaela Finney D. Wackelin Christina S. Kang-Yun Dan M. Park S. Leonard

Aug 2026 · bioRxiv · 0 citations · 51 references

Biology

TL;DR

It is determined that portions of protein sequence space, despite being unobserved in nature, contains many functional proteins that cannot be predicted accurately in silico, providing experimental support for the hypothesis that natural protein sequences explored by evolution represent a miniscule fraction of all possible functional sequences.

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