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The review aims to explore methods for enhancing protein function prediction using multimodal strategies.

April 30, 2026International Journal of Molecular Sciences2 citationsOpen Access

Integrating Protein Language Models with Multimodal Embeddings to Accelerate Function Prediction of Uncharacterized Proteins

RCRuyang ChengNational University of Defense Technology TLTianyu LiuNational University of Defense Technology CLChentao LiaoNational University of Defense Technology

Key Points

The review aims to explore methods for enhancing protein function prediction using multimodal strategies.
Systematic review of current protein function prediction approaches.
Integration of three-dimensional geometric features, chemical semantics, and textual knowledge.
Evaluation of multimodal frameworks against traditional tools.
Identifies gaps in current protein function prediction methods.
Highlights the potential of multimodal approaches in enhancing functional annotation.
Suggests future directions for integrating physics-informed machine learning.

Abstract

Accurate prediction of protein function is fundamental to progress in biotechnology and biomedicine, yet progress remains severely hampered by the widening chasm between exponentially growing genomic data and the limited capacity for functional annotation. High-throughput sequencing and metagenomics have driven an explosion in sequence data that far outstrips experimental characterization. UniProt now contains over 203 million protein entries, of which only ~2% have been experimentally validated. This widening “sequence–function gap” exceeds the reach of traditional homology-based tools such as BLAST (v2.17.0) and HMMER (v3.2), which are inherently constrained by sequence identity thresholds. The emergence of Protein Language Models (PLMs), including ESM and ProtTrans, has introduced a transformative paradigm, thereby shifting functional inference from similarity-based retrieval to geometric reasoning within learned semantic spaces. Nevertheless, current approaches remain largely confined to unimodal or narrowly bimodal frameworks, failing to capture the inherently multidimensional determinants of enzymatic function, including active-site geometry, chemical reaction logic, and literature-embedded semantic context. This review systematically adopts a multimodal global-fusion perspective, elucidating how three-dimensional geometric features, chemical reaction semantics, and textual knowledge graphs are synergistically integrated around PLMs as a core backbone. We delineate complementary mechanisms and integration strategies that together enable fine-grained protein function annotation beyond the performance ceiling of single-sequence methods. Furthermore, we survey the translational potential of such frameworks from computational prediction to real biological applications, and critically examine persistent bottlenecks including activity cliffs, transition-state inference, and conformational dynamics. We identify the integration of physics-informed machine learning with dynamics-aware architectures as a pivotal direction toward a causal, mechanism-level understanding of protein function.

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