ESM3 generates esmGFP, a new fluorescent protein estimated at ‘500 million years of evolution’ from nature
Result confirmed
The takeaway
EvolutionaryScale’s ESM3, a multimodal protein language model, generated esmGFP, a bright fluorescent protein only 58% identical to the closest known fluorescent protein.
Status
- Claim
Result confirmed
- Our reporting
- High confidence
- Verification
- Peer-reviewed
- Importance
- 3 of 5
- Last verified
- 29 September 2026
Your AI and this story
- GPT-6 AstraIn its training data
- Claude Opus 5.5In its training data
- Gemini 4 HydrogenIn its training data
- Grok 4.7In its training data
It happened before the cutoffs of all four assistants, so it can be in their training data.
Key facts
- Announced 25 Jun 2024; Science paper published online Jan 2025
- esmGFP: 58% sequence identity to the nearest known fluorescent protein
- ‘500 million years of evolution’ is the authors’ estimate
What happened
ESM3 was prompted with a few key residues of GFP’s chromophore site and generated whole new proteins. One, esmGFP, glowed after refinement rounds.
Why it matters
It showed language models producing functional proteins far outside the natural sequence space.
Sources
2 sources from 2 sites. Numbers match the chips in the text.
2 sources: 2 primary
Primary
- Simulating 500 million years of evolution with a language model (Science)science.org, paper
- EvolutionaryScale: ESM3 releaseevolutionaryscale.ai, official
Changes
- Filed