Efficient, Few-Shot Directed Evolution with Energy Rank Alignment

Directed evolution is a powerful and widely used technique for protein engineering, and reducing the cost of iterated experimental observations has become a major priority for practitioners. A number of recent efforts to use machine-learning-based predictors to improve sequence selection have led to remarkable improvements in efficiency, but the sparse data at each experimental iteration restricts these approaches to extremely simple models. Adapting large-scale pre-trained protein language models using experimental data offers an alternative that we show productively leverages the strong inductive biases of the natural distribution of protein sequences to navigate high-dimensional, combinatorially large fitness landscapes. Our approach uses a general-purpose "post-training" algorithm grounded in statistical physics that employs quantitative experimental rankings to directly produce a sampler for diverse, high fitness sequences with fewer data points than competing methods. The resulting adapted protein language model can itself be studied and interpreted, shedding further light on the biophysical characteristics of highly fit sequences and their properties.