Accurate ΔTm Prediction Without Protein Structure Inputs for Biomolecular Stability

Authors

Siegismund, D., Wieser, M., Natali, E., Steigele, S.

Abstract

Predicting protein stability, like changes in melting temperature ({Delta}Tm) caused by mutations, is a critical task in therapeutic protein engineering and drug discovery. This is reflected by a growing solution space, including both AI-based sequence and structure based methods. This paper demonstrates that accurate {Delta}Tm prediction does not require structural input features, but can achieve state-of-the-art results with a careful training design for large sequence-based protein language models. We combine an autoresearch-inspired setup search with controlled ablation studies and show that a well-tuned sequence-only ESM2-650M model outperforms structure-informed methods in our benchmark, achieving the lowest error (MAE/RMSE) and competitive Pearson correlation without pH or structural inputs. We further show that choices such as loss function, pooling strategy, auxiliary supervision, and fine-tuning regime materially affect performance.

Preprint server: bioRxiv
The authors list and abstract were imported from bioRxiv on 08 Jul 2026.

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