Using protein language models for pangenome construction (opens in new tab)

Current pangenome construction methods rely largely on nucleotide or protein sequence alignment, limiting their ability to detect remote orthologs and semantic relations. We introduce a novel method that leverages protein language model embeddings to capture functional and semantic relationships beyond sequence similarity. Our approach employs approximate nearest-neighbor search coupled with a clustering step utilizing HDBSCAN, DBSCAN, or weighted single-linkage clustering with multiple simil...