Designer builds a protein font: 26 proteins that fold into letters via ESM-Fold2 backprop
alex_peys · x · 2026-08-19
Inspired by an Anthropic post, developer @alexpeys created a "protein font": by backpropagating through the folding model ESM-Fold2 and asking that the folded protein's distogram match a target shape, he generated 26 proteins that look like letters A–Z when folded.
- An online generator lets you render custom protein-style banners, and shapes aren't limited to letters
- The design pipeline and PDB files containing the protein sequences are open-sourced in the shape2prot repo for reproduction
- The author notes the pipeline wasn't fully automated and required manual tuning; ChatGPT helped along the way (Fable refused)
Related event: Developer Creates Protein Font by Backpropagating Through ESMFold(2 posts)→
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