RINGER: Conformer Ensemble Generation of Macrocyclic Peptides with Sequence-Conditioned Internal Coordinate Diffusion

Colin A Grambow, Hayley Weir, Nathaniel Lee Diamant, Tommaso Biancalani, Gabriele Scalia, Kangway V. Chuang

Primary Area: applications to physical sciences (physics, chemistry, biology, etc.)

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Keywords: molecular conformer generation, generative models, diffusion models, internal coordinates, peptides, macrocycles

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Abstract: Macrocyclic peptides are an emerging therapeutic modality, yet computational approaches for accurately sampling their diverse 3D ensembles remain challenging due to their conformational diversity and geometric constraints. Here, we introduce RINGER, a diffusion-based transformer model for conditional generation of macrocycle peptides based on redundant internal coordinates. RINGER provides fast backbone- and side-chain sampling while respecting key structural invariances of cyclic peptides. Through extensive benchmarking and analysis against gold-standard conformer ensembles of cyclic peptides generated with metadynamics, we demonstrate how RINGER generates both high-quality and diverse geometries at a fraction of the computational cost. Our work lays the foundation for improved sampling of cyclic geometries and the development of geometric learning methods for peptides.

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Submission Number: 6175