Efficient exploration of peptide libraries using active learning with AlphaFold-based screening

We previously showed that AlphaFold2 can be used to screen for peptide-binding epitopes targeting the extraterminal (ET) domain of Bromodomain and Extraterminal (BET) proteins from candidate protein partners identified in pull-down experiments. However, such approaches require large numbers of AlphaFold2 calculations, making exhaustive screening impractical for larger datasets, such as viral proteomes that may target the ET domain. In many cases, identifying a substantial fraction of binders — even without exhaustive coverage — would already provide valuable biological insight into these interaction networks. Here, we show that an active learning strategy based on Thompson sampling (TS) can efficiently explore peptide sequence space. Using a library derived from BRD3 pull-down experiments, TS recovers 50% of all binders using 15% of the queries required by exhaustive sampling (3.3 times improvement over random sampling). Moreover, TS consistently identifies experimentally known binding epitopes with substantially fewer queries. Because the approach relies only on binary labels, it is readily transferable to other protein-peptide systems where AF-based binding classification is applicable, as well as to peptide-property predictors for properties such as solubility or aggregation propensity.