{"id":223551,"date":"2025-10-16T23:23:58","date_gmt":"2025-10-17T04:23:58","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/learning-the-language-of-lasso-peptides-to-improve-peptide-engineering"},"modified":"2025-10-16T23:23:58","modified_gmt":"2025-10-17T04:23:58","slug":"learning-the-language-of-lasso-peptides-to-improve-peptide-engineering","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2025\/10\/learning-the-language-of-lasso-peptides-to-improve-peptide-engineering","title":{"rendered":"Learning the language of lasso peptides to improve peptide engineering"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/learning-the-language-of-lasso-peptides-to-improve-peptide-engineering.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>In the hunt for new therapeutics for cancer and infectious diseases, lasso peptides prove to be a catch. Their knot-like structures afford these molecules high stability and diverse biological activities, making them a promising avenue for new therapeutics. To better unleash their clinical potential, a team from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology has developed LassoESM, a new large language model for predicting lasso peptide properties.<\/p>\n<p>The collaborative study was recently <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-025-63412-3\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in Nature Communications.<\/p>\n<p>Lasso peptides are <a href=\"https:\/\/phys.org\/tags\/natural+products\/\" rel=\"tag\" class=\"\">natural products<\/a> made by bacteria. To produce these peptides, bacteria use ribosomes to build chains of amino acids that are then folded by biosynthetic enzymes into a unique slip knot-like structure. Through this process, thousands of different lasso peptides are generated, many of which have demonstrated antibacterial, antiviral, and anticancer properties.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>In the hunt for new therapeutics for cancer and infectious diseases, lasso peptides prove to be a catch. Their knot-like structures afford these molecules high stability and diverse biological activities, making them a promising avenue for new therapeutics. To better unleash their clinical potential, a team from the Carl R. Woese Institute for Genomic Biology [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-223551","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223551","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=223551"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/223551\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=223551"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=223551"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=223551"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}