Prof. Sergei Maslov's Lecture on Protein Language Models
July 29 – Professor Sergei Maslov from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign gave a seminar entitled “From Protein Sequence to Biological Function: What Protein Language Models Know.” He introduced how protein language models extract meaningful representations from large-scale amino acid sequence datasets and outlined advances from protein-family classification to the analysis of intrinsically disordered regions. Drawing on recent studies, Professor Maslov further discussed how these models reveal mutation fitness effects, epistasis, and the structural, functional, and evolutionary constraints encoded in protein sequences.