from Hacker News

Learning From DNA: a grand challenge in biology

by ninjha01 on 3/14/24, 5:56 PM with 26 comments

• by ninjha01 on 3/14/24, 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 jashephe on 3/14/24, 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_silin on 3/14/24, 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 pfisherman on 3/14/24, 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 visarga on 3/14/24, 8:45 PM

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