| name | bioemu-protein-ensembles |
| description | Operate Microsoft BioEmu to sample approximate equilibrium conformational ensembles for protein monomers from amino-acid sequences or supplied MSAs. Use when studying protein flexibility, alternative conformations, free-energy landscapes, disorder, ensemble generation, physical steering, or downstream side-chain reconstruction and MD relaxation. |
BioEmu Protein Ensembles
Use BioEmu when a single static structure is insufficient. It samples monomer ensembles and does not replace molecular dynamics, multimer modeling, or experimental biophysics.
Workflow
- Confirm that the target is a protein monomer. Route multimers or ligand complexes to a complex-prediction workflow.
- Validate the amino-acid sequence, residue numbering, construct boundaries, mutations, tags, and disordered regions.
- Decide whether to use automatic ColabFold MSA retrieval or a supplied A3M file. Record the MSA source and date.
- Estimate sample count from protein length, available GPU memory, and the downstream analysis. Start with a small pilot before requesting thousands of conformations.
- Run default sampling, then inspect the fraction removed for clashes or chain discontinuities.
- If physical failure rates are high, enable the official steering configuration and compare steered versus unsteered distributions.
- Cluster the retained ensemble and quantify structural diversity with RMSD, radius of gyration, contacts, secondary structure, or task-specific collective variables.
- Reconstruct side chains and perform optional short relaxation only for representative structures, not blindly for the entire ensemble.
- Compare ensemble observables with experimental data or independent simulations when available.
Guardrails
- Do not interpret sampling frequency as a calibrated experimental population without validation.
- Do not use the linker trick as a validated multimer workflow.
- Report filtered sample counts; never analyze only the requested count.
- Preserve checkpoint, seed, MSA, steering configuration, and filtering settings.
- Treat large disordered regions and long proteins as higher-risk for clashes, chain breaks, and prohibitive runtime.
- Separate generated backbone ensembles from reconstructed or MD-relaxed all-atom structures.
Output Contract
Return the input construct, MSA provenance, checkpoint, sampling and steering parameters, requested and retained counts, QC failure rates, ensemble summary, representative structures, and limitations.
Read references/operations.md for installation, CLI examples, steering, post-processing, and canonical sources.