MutexaGPT: an intuition-to-design translator for physics-based enzyme engineering

Abstract Physical intuition about how enzyme structure and dynamics shape function has guided successful engineering efforts, yet a systematic approach is still lacking for translating these qualitative and abstract ‘thoughts’ into quantitative, actionable principles for enzyme design. Here we introduce MutexaGPT, an open-access, multi-agent large language model platform that translates enzyme engineering intuition to physics-based simulations and thus variant designs. Through a web-interface, MutexaGPT takes plain-English, intuition-driven requests as input and leverages large language model agents to elicit missing information, construct physics-based models, configure and execute high-throughput molecular modeling workflows, and convert the results into actionable design proposals, such as smart mutation libraries. We demonstrate the utility of MutexaGPT in two protein engineering tasks: (1) engineering halide methyltransferase toward bulkier substrates and (2) engineering bidomain amylase for enhanced activity at lower temperature. These results establish MutexaGPT as an intuition-to-design translator that integrates human creativity with high-throughput molecular modeling to democratize physics-guided, intuition-driven enzyme engineering.

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Publication Details

Journal
Nature Computational Science
Published
2026-09-10
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-026-01049-y
Primary Topic
Protein Structure and Dynamics
Type
article
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article

MutexaGPT: an intuition-to-design translator for physics-based enzyme engineering

Yinjie Zhong, Zhongyue Yang, Qianzhen Shao, Xinchun Ran et al.
Nature Computational Science
Protein Structure and Dynamics
article

MutexaGPT: an intuition-to-design translator for physics-based enzyme engineering

Yinjie Zhong, Zhongyue Yang, Qianzhen Shao, Xinchun Ran, Kieran Nehil-Puleo, Ruizhe Yao, Sebastian Stull, Han Xu, Ning Ding
article en

Abstract

Abstract Physical intuition about how enzyme structure and dynamics shape function has guided successful engineering efforts, yet a systematic approach is still lacking for translating these qualitative and abstract ‘thoughts’ into quantitative, actionable principles for enzyme design. Here we introduce MutexaGPT, an open-access, multi-agent large language model platform that translates enzyme engineering intuition to physics-based simulations and thus variant designs. Through a web-interface, MutexaGPT takes plain-English, intuition-driven requests as input and leverages large language model agents to elicit missing information, construct physics-based models, configure and execute high-throughput molecular modeling workflows, and convert the results into actionable design proposals, such as smart mutation libraries. We demonstrate the utility of MutexaGPT in two protein engineering tasks: (1) engineering halide methyltransferase toward bulkier substrates and (2) engineering bidomain amylase for enhanced activity at lower temperature. These results establish MutexaGPT as an intuition-to-design translator that integrates human creativity with high-throughput molecular modeling to democratize physics-guided, intuition-driven enzyme engineering.

Nature Computational Science
Vanderbilt University (US)
Openalex Percentile: Top 18%
Protein Structure and Dynamics
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MutexaGPT: an intuition-to-design translator for physics-based enzyme engineering — Yinjie Zhong, Zhongyue Yang, et al. · Nature Computational Science (2026) | TGRS Research Map | TGRS