DeepMind develops methods for invisible watermarking of AI-generated proteins — Live Science
The Google DeepMind team has developed technologies for invisible watermarking of proteins created by artificial intelligence. The methods are intended to help establish the origin of such developments without disrupting protein functions, Live Science reports.
Two watermarking methods
The developers named the family of methods SynthIDBio. The first of them, SynthIDBio-sequence, adds a hidden marker to the amino acid sequence of a protein generated by the ProteinMPNN program. The system subtly influences the selection of amino acids using a secret key, and a person who knows this key can verify how likely it is that the sequence was created using such watermarking.
The second method, SynthIDBio-structure, embeds a marker in the structural description of a protein. To do this, a modified AlphaFold 3 makes minimal changes to the spatial arrangement of atoms, which can later be detected by a detector. In tests, the systems identified more than 99% of watermarked proteins and correctly ignored 99.9% of unwatermarked ones.
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Technology limitations
The DeepMind team showed that proteins with markers could bind to their targets in the same way as unwatermarked proteins. Roy Sleator, a professor of biology at Munster Technological University who was not involved in the study, believes the technology could help reduce the risks of unauthorized toxin creation, improve database operations, and label engineered proteins for additional safety checks.
At the same time, experts surveyed by the publication cautioned that the markers can be removed. According to Bruce Wittmann, a principal applied research specialist at Microsoft, a marker in a sequence can be eliminated by changing the amino acid sequence, while a structural marker can be removed by adding noise or changing spatial coordinates. A significant share of software for predicting and creating proteins is open source, which also complicates the introduction of watermarking as an industry standard. Experts view the technology as one layer of biosafety protection rather than a standalone solution.
