Improvements

What have we done with jax-unirep that improve upon the original?

Primarily, we have made improvements in three areas.

Firstly, speed through reimplementation: By leveraging modern automatic differentiation packages, specifically JAX, we were able to accelerate the UniRep model over 100X over the original. Our preprint on bioarxiv provides additional detail on our claim.

Secondly, robustness: we have extensively unit tested the model code, so that others may use it with confidence. The code has 96% test coverage, and we leverage Travis CI for continuous integration, such that every change is tested extensively.

Thirdly, user-friendly APIs: Most of our expected user base should be not-so-technical protein engineers. ("Technical" being extensively comfortable with Python; protein engineering is a very technical discipline!) As such, developed APIs that prevent many sources of user error that may interfere with safe handling of UniRep. One example is that our most commonly-used functions, for calculating representations of proteins and evotuning, always accept Python strings rather than hand-prepared tensors.

Finally, docs: The fact that you're here means you're benefiting from the hosted API docs! We hope you find it to be easy to use and navigate.