Breaking the Timescale Barrier: Generative Discovery of Conformational Free-Energy Landscapes and Transition Pathways

Abstract

Molecular transitions -- such as protein folding, allostery, and membrane transport -- are central to biology yet remain notoriously difficult to simulate. Their intrinsic rarity pushes them beyond reach of standard molecular dynamics, while enhanced-sampling methods are costly and often depend on arbitrary variables that bias outcomes. We introduce Gen-COMPAS, a generative committor-guided path sampling framework that reconstructs transition pathways without predefined variables and at a fraction of the cost. Gen-COMPAS couples a generative diffusion model, which produces physically realistic intermediates, with committor-based filtering to pinpoint transition states. Short unbiased simulations from these intermediates rapidly yield full transition-path ensembles that converge within nanoseconds, where conventional methods require orders of magnitude more sampling. Applied to systems from a miniprotein to a ribose-binding protein to a mitochondrial carrier, Gen-COMPAS retrieves committors, transition states, and free-energy landscapes efficiently, uniting machine learning and molecular dynamics for broad mechanistic and practical insight.