BOL: Related items

NVIDIA and Arc Institute Unveil Evo 2: A Breakthrough AI for DNA Design

BioStar — Fri, 21 Feb 2025 10:39:47 -0600

NVIDIA and the Arc Institute have introduced Evo 2, a groundbreaking AI model designed to understand, predict, and generate DNA sequences. This marks a major advancement in computational biology, offering scientists an unprecedented tool to decode the genetic blueprint of life and even design entirely new biological systems.

The Power of Evo 2: AI Meets DNA

Evo 2 is the largest AI model for biology ever created, trained on an astonishing 9.3 trillion DNA "letters" (nucleotides) carefully selected from genomes spanning the entire tree of life. This massive dataset ensures that Evo 2 can recognize patterns and relationships in genetic sequences at an unparalleled scale.

For the first time, scientists can design DNA with AI, moving beyond simple sequence analysis to active DNA generation. Evo 2 enables researchers to predict, modify, and even create entire genetic sequences, opening new possibilities in medicine, agriculture, and synthetic biology.

Decoding the Dark Genome

One of the biggest challenges in genetics is understanding the non-coding regions of DNA—vast stretches of the genome that do not code for proteins but play crucial roles in regulating gene expression. These regions control when and how genes are activated, influencing everything from development to disease.

Evo 2 is designed to decode these non-coding elements, helping researchers uncover their functions and use this knowledge to develop gene-based therapies, synthetic life forms, and precision agriculture solutions.

From Reading DNA to Writing It

To put Evo 2’s impact into perspective:

Previous AI models could "read" DNA like a book, analyzing genetic sequences and identifying patterns.
Evo 2 can "write" entirely new DNA, designing functional genes, chromosomes, and even full genomes from scratch.

This means scientists can now engineer biological systems with AI, designing new proteins, metabolic pathways, and genetic circuits to address real-world challenges.

A Step Toward Generative Biology

The Arc Institute describes Evo 2 as a major step toward "generative biology"—a revolutionary approach where AI is used to create novel biological structures rather than just analyzing existing ones. This could lead to breakthroughs such as:

New medicines: AI-generated enzymes and proteins tailored for targeted therapies.
Disease-resistant crops: Genetically optimized plants for higher yield and climate resilience.
Synthetic organisms: Custom-designed microbes for bioremediation, biofuel production, and industrial applications.

An Open-Source Revolution

Unlike many proprietary AI models, Evo 2 is open source, making its capabilities accessible to researchers worldwide. This democratization of AI-driven biology means that scientists from different disciplines can collaborate, experiment, and innovate, accelerating discoveries in genetic engineering and synthetic biology.

With Evo 2, the boundaries of what’s possible in DNA design, genetic engineering, and biological innovation are being redrawn. The future of life sciences is no longer just about understanding life’s code—it’s about writing it.

MSAProbs - Parallel and accurate multiple sequence alignment

Neel — Tue, 09 Jul 2019 23:58:44 -0500

MSAProbs is a well-established state-of-the-art multiple sequence alignment algorithm for protein sequences. The design of MSAProbs is based on a combination of pair hidden Markov models and partition functions to calculate posterior probabilities. Assessed using the popular benchmarks: BAliBASE, PREFAB, SABmark and OXBENCH, MSAProbs achieves statistically significant accuracy improvements over the existing top performing aligners, including ClustalW, MAFFT, MUSCLE, ProbCons and Probalign. In addition, MSAProbs is optimized for shared-memory CPUs by employing a multi-threaded design, and further parallelized for distributed-memory systems using MPI to overcome high memory overhead barrier and achieve good parallel and data-size scalability.

Address of the bookmark: http://msaprobs.sourceforge.net/homepage.htm#latest

Caretta – A multiple protein structure alignment and feature extraction suite

Rahul Nayak — Fri, 18 Dec 2020 02:09:44 -0600

Caretta – a multiple protein structure alignment and feature extraction suite

Caretta, a multiple structure alignment suite meant for homologous but sequentially divergent protein families which consistently returns accurate alignments with a higher coverage than current state-of-the-art tools. Caretta is available as a GUI and command-line application and additionally outputs an aligned structure feature matrix for a given set of input structures, which can readily be used in downstream steps for supervised or unsupervised machine learning.

Address of the bookmark: http://www.bioinformatics.nl/caretta/

svelter

Jitendra Prajapati — Mon, 29 Feb 2016 17:33:15 -0600

This software is designed to identify both simple and complex rearrangements from paired-end sequencing data. Users could ran it easily by just alling SVelter.py with proper parameters. It's also possible to ran it on multiple cores by calling different sub-functions separately.

More at https://github.com/mills-lab/svelter/

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/mills-lab/svelter/

GRIDSS: the Genomic Rearrangement IDentification Software Suite

Rahul Nayak — Sun, 17 May 2020 10:27:44 -0500

GRIDSS is a module software suite containing tools useful for the detection of genomic rearrangements. GRIDSS includes a genome-wide break-end assembler, as well as a structural variation caller for Illumina sequencing data. GRIDSS calls variants based on alignment-guided positional de Bruijn graph genome-wide break-end assembly, split read, and read pair evidence.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/PapenfussLab/gridss

Tree illustrating the lack of interchromosomal rearrangement of the microchromosomes.

BioJoker — Mon, 26 Nov 2018 04:20:33 -0600

Tree illustrating the lack of interchromosomal rearrangement of the microchromosomes. No interchromosomal microchromosome fusions from the avian ancestor unless otherwise stated (macrochromosomal fusions not listed). The overall pattern of microchromosome stability and rearrangement across the species is illustrated

Jarvis et al. (2014)

Reference https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s00412-018-0685-6

S-plot2: Rapid Visual and Statistical Analysis of Genomic Sequences

Abhimanyu Singh — Tue, 02 Oct 2018 17:57:27 -0500

S-plot2 creates an interactive, two-dimensional heatmap capturing the similarities and dissimilarities in nucleotide usage between genomic sequences (partial or complete). In S-plot2, whole eukaryotic chromosomes and smaller prokaryotic genomes can be efficiently compared. The tool includes functionality to extract, analyze, and automate BLAST queries of regions of interest within the heatmap. This facilitates the investigation of quickly evolving coding regions, novel coding regions, and laterally transferred elements.

Address of the bookmark: https://bitbucket.org/lkalesinskas/splot

Nucl2Vec: Local alignment of DNA sequences using Distributed Vector Representation

Jit — Tue, 16 Mar 2021 05:45:44 -0500

We demonstrate a novel approach forlocal alignment of DNA reads with respect to reference genome.For this process we have used Skip-gram model for creatingencoding(Nucl2Vec) and k-nearest neighbor for the alignment.With our new approach we have reduced computation cost forlocal alignment , while achieving accuracy comparable to existingdefacto standard BWA-MEM tool.

https://prakharg24.github.io/papers/401851.full.pdf

Address of the bookmark: https://prakharg24.github.io/papers/401851.full.pdf

minimap2: A versatile pairwise aligner for genomic and spliced nucleotide sequences

Jit — Wed, 20 Jun 2018 07:55:29 -0500

git clone https://github.com/lh3/minimap2 cd minimap2 && make # long sequences against a reference genome ./minimap2 -a test/MT-human.fa test/MT-orang.fa > test.sam # create an index first and then map ./minimap2 -d MT-human.mmi test/MT-human.fa ./minimap2 -a MT-human.mmi test/MT-orang.fa > test.sam # use presets (no test data) ./minimap2 -ax map-pb ref.fa pacbio.fq.gz > aln.sam # PacBio genomic reads ./minimap2 -ax map-ont ref.fa ont.fq.gz > aln.sam # Oxford Nanopore genomic reads ./minimap2 -ax sr ref.fa read1.fa read2.fa > aln.sam # short genomic paired-end reads ./minimap2 -ax splice ref.fa rna-reads.fa > aln.sam # spliced long reads ./minimap2 -ax splice -k14 -uf ref.fa reads.fa > aln.sam # Nanopore Direct RNA-seq ./minimap2 -cx asm5 asm1.fa asm2.fa > aln.paf # intra-species asm-to-asm alignment ./minimap2 -x ava-pb reads.fa reads.fa > overlaps.paf # PacBio read overlap ./minimap2 -x ava-ont reads.fa reads.fa > overlaps.paf # Nanopore read overlap # man page for detailed command line options man ./minimap2.1

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/lh3/minimap2

COSINE: non-seeding method for mapping long noisy sequences

Jit — Fri, 26 Oct 2018 00:41:59 -0500

Third generation sequencing (TGS) are highly promising technologies but the long and noisy reads from TGS are difficult to align using existing algorithms. Here, we present COSINE, a conceptually new method designed specifically for aligning long reads contaminated by a high level of errors.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/SUwonglab/COSINE