Min-kyung Baek
Seoul National University · Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology
About the Lab
Professor Min-kyung Baek's research lab specializes in developing advanced deep learning methods for protein structure prediction and de novo protein design, with a strong focus on integrating structural biology with artificial intelligence. The lab pioneers end-to-end neural network architectures—such as RoseTTAFold and its variants—that predict 3D protein structures, protein-nucleic acid complexes, and oligomeric assemblies with high accuracy and speed. Their work extends to novel generative models for protein design and the adaptation of attention mechanisms to capture complex sequence-structure relationships. The lab also develops accessible computational tools, like GalaxyHomomer and RoseTTAFoldNA, to support structural biology research across diverse biological systems.
Research Overview
Research Output Trend
Figures are computed from collected data and may differ slightly.
Selected Papers
15DeepMind presented notably accurate predictions at the recent 14th Critical Assessment of Structure Prediction (CASP14) conference. We explored network architectures that incorporate related ideas and obtained the best performance with a three-track network in which information at the one-dimensional (1D) sequence level, the 2D distance map level, and the 3D coordinate level is successively transformed and integrated. The three-track network produces structure predictions with accuracies approac
Protein-RNA and protein-DNA complexes play critical roles in biology. Despite considerable recent advances in protein structure prediction, the prediction of the structures of protein-nucleic acid complexes without homology to known complexes is a largely unsolved problem. Here we extend the RoseTTAFold machine learning protein-structure-prediction approach to additionally predict nucleic acid and protein-nucleic acid complexes. We develop a single trained network, RoseTTAFoldNA, that rapidly pr
Abstract AlphaFold2 and RoseTTAFold predict protein structures with very high accuracy despite substantial architecture differences. We sought to develop an improved method combining features of both. The resulting method, RoseTTAFold2, extends the original three-track architecture of RoseTTAFold over the full network, incorporating the concepts of Frame-aligned point error, recycling during training, and the use of a distillation set from AlphaFold2. We also took from AlphaFold2 the idea of str
Homo-oligomerization of proteins is abundant in nature, and is often intimately related with the physiological functions of proteins, such as in metabolism, signal transduction or immunity. Information on the homo-oligomer structure is therefore important to obtain a molecular-level understanding of protein functions and their regulation. Currently available web servers predict protein homo-oligomer structures either by template-based modeling using homo-oligomer templates selected from the prot
Abstract Protein-nucleic acid complexes play critical roles in biology. Despite considerable recent advances in protein structure prediction, the prediction of the structures of protein-nucleic acid complexes without homology to known complexes is a largely unsolved problem. Here we extend the RoseTTAFold end-to-end deep learning approach to modeling of nucleic acid and protein-nucleic acid complexes. We develop a single trained network, RoseTTAFoldNA, that rapidly produces 3D structure models w
Identification of bacterial protein-protein interactions and predicting the structures of these complexes could aid in the understanding of pathogenicity mechanisms and developing treatments for infectious diseases. Here we developed RoseTTAFold2-Lite, a rapid deep learning model that leverages residue-residue coevolution and protein structure prediction to systematically identify and structurally characterize protein-protein interactions at the proteome-wide scale. Using this pipeline, we searc
Abstract DeepMind presented remarkably accurate protein structure predictions at the CASP14 conference. We explored network architectures incorporating related ideas and obtained the best performance with a 3-track network in which information at the 1D sequence level, the 2D distance map level, and the 3D coordinate level is successively transformed and integrated. The 3-track network produces structure predictions with accuracies approaching those of DeepMind in CASP14, enables rapid solution
For CASP14, we developed deep learning-based methods for predicting homo-oligomeric and hetero-oligomeric contacts and used them for oligomer modeling. To build structure models, we developed an oligomer structure generation method that utilizes predicted interchain contacts to guide iterative restrained minimization from random backbone structures. We supplemented this gradient-based fold-and-dock method with template-based and ab initio docking approaches using deep learning-based subunit pred
The majority of proteins must form higher-order assemblies to perform their biological functions, yet few machine learning models can accurately and rapidly predict the symmetry of assemblies involving multiple copies of the same protein chain. Here, we address this gap by finetuning several classes of protein foundation models, to predict homo-oligomer symmetry. Our best model named Seq2Symm, which utilizes ESM2, outperforms existing template-based and deep learning methods achieving an average
Accurate prediction of protein structures is essential for understanding their biological functions. The release of AlphaFold2 in 2021 marked a significant breakthrough, delivering unprecedented accuracy. However, challenges remain, particularly for proteins with limited evolutionary data or complex molecular interactions. This review explores efforts to enhance AlphaFold2’s performance through advanced sequence search techniques and alternative approaches, including protein language models and
Many proteins need to form oligomers to be functional, so oligomer structures provide important clues to biological roles of proteins. Prediction of oligomer structures therefore can be a useful tool in the absence of experimentally resolved structures. In this article, we describe the server and human methods that we used to predict oligomer structures in the CASP13 experiment. Performances of the methods on the 42 CASP13 oligomer targets consisting of 30 homo-oligomers and 12 hetero-oligomers
An accurate protein structure prediction from its amino acid sequence is a longstanding challenge in computational biology. Considerable progress has recently been made by leveraging genetic information through deep learningbased methods. In this talk, I'll present a three-track attention-based neural network named RoseTTAFold. In this model, information at the 1D sequence level, the 2D distance map level, and the 3D coordinate level are successively transformed and integrated to generate accura
Research Areas
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