Self-assembling Peptide Discovery: Overcoming Human Bias With Machine Learning

Peptide materials have a wide array of functions from tissue engineering, surface coatings to catalysis and sensing. This class of biopolymer is composed of a sequence, comprised of 20 naturally occurring amino acids whose arrangement dictate the peptide functionality. While it is highly desirable to tailor the amino acid sequence, a small increase in their sequence length leads to dramatic increase in the possible candidates (e.g., from tripeptide = 20^3 or 8,000 peptides to a pentapeptide = 20^5 or 3.2 M). Traditionally, peptide design is guided by the use of structural propensity tables, hydrophobicity scales, or other desired properties and typically yields