Learning From DNA: a grand challenge in biology

by ninjha01on 3/14/2024, 5:56 PMwith 26 comments

by ninjha01on 3/14/2024, 9:08 PM

I built the wrapper/playground [0] linked in the article. Feel free to give feedback here or by the email in my bio

[0] https://evo.nitro.bio/

by jashepheon 3/14/2024, 10:19 PM

I'm a little disappointed that their linked preprint doesn't appear to include any molecular biology; i.e. they don't actually try to synthesize any of their predicted sequences and test function. It wouldn't be an outrageous synthesis task to make some of the CRISPR-Cas sequences they generated.

Also interesting that AlphaMisense is omitted from Figure 2B; it substantially outperforms the ESM-based ESM1b in our hands. But I guess the idea is that this is a general-purpose DNA language model whereas AlphaMissense is domain-specific for variant effect prediction?

by d_silinon 3/14/2024, 8:59 PM

Would be interesting to see what comes of it.

As you progress along the following chain: genomics-->proteomics->interactomics->metabolomics, our understanding becomes blurrier and challenges harder.

by pfishermanon 3/14/2024, 8:00 PM

Just gonna leave this here.

https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2024.02.29.582810v1

Tl;dr: DNA is NOT all you need.

by visargaon 3/14/2024, 8:45 PM

DNA is all you need? In the future generative AI will generate You!