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.
Authors
- Yinjie Zhong (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-2270-4725)
- Zhongyue Yang (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0003-0395-6617)
- Qianzhen Shao (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-7787-0966)
- Xinchun Ran (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0001-5052-1758)
- Kieran Nehil-Puleo (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-1505-2554)
- Ruizhe Yao
- Sebastian Stull
- Han Xu
- Ning Ding
Institutions
- Vanderbilt University (US)
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
- Field-Weighted Citation Impact
- 0.00