Biological structure and function emerge from scaling unsupervised learning to 250 million protein sequences

Significance Learning biological properties from sequence data is a logical step toward generative and predictive artificial intelligence for biology. Here, we propose scaling a deep contextual language model with unsupervised learning to sequences spanning evolutionary diversity. We find that without prior knowledge, information emerges in the learned representations on fundamental properties of proteins such as secondary structure, contacts, and biological activity. We show the learned representations are useful across benchmarks for remote homology detection, prediction of secondary structure, long-range residue–residue contacts, and mutational effect. Unsupervised representation learning enables state-of-the-art supervised prediction of mutational effect and secondary structure and improves state-of-the-art features for long-range contact prediction.