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.

Yannick Wurm Lab

Thu, 07 Aug 2014 18:02:37 -0500

Evolutionary genomics of social insects. Extensive theoretical work has explained how and why complex societies evolve. However, only little is known about the genes and molecular mechanisms responsible for social phenotypes. We have been identifying genes and mechanisms involved in the evolution of insect societies using modern genomics tools (Illumina, RNAseq, RADseq...). For example we recently:

1. sequenced and analyzed the genome of the invasive red fire ant Solenopsis invicta (PNAS 2011)

2. discovered that a fundamental social trait in this species (how many queens are accepted in the colony) is determined by variants of a social chromosome (Nature 2013).

3. described the gene expression changes that occur in a virgin queen when she is given the opportunity of replacing her mother (Mol Ecol 2010).

Homepage: http://yannick.poulet.org/

dipSPAdes: Assembler for Highly Polymorphic Diploid Genomes.

Jit — Wed, 20 Dec 2017 18:35:16 -0600

While the number of sequenced diploid genomes have been steadily increasing in the last few years, assembly of highly polymorphic (HP) diploid genomes remains challenging. As a result, there is a shortage of tools for assembling HP genomes from the next generation sequencing (NGS) data. The initial approaches to assembling HP genomes were proposed in the pre-NGS era and are not well suited for NGS projects. To address this limitation, we developed the first de Bruijn graph assembler, dipSPAdes, for HP genomes that significantly improves on the state-of-the-art assemblers for HP diploid genomes.

Address of the bookmark: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/25734602

DeCoSTAR: Reconstructing the Ancestral Organization of Genes or Genomes Using Reconciled Phylogenies

Shruti Paniwala — Fri, 03 Jan 2020 13:28:19 -0600

DeCoSTAR computes adjacency evolutionary scenarios using a scoring scheme based on a weighted sum of adjacency gains and breakages. Solutions, both optimal and near-optimal, are sampled according to the Boltzmann–Gibbs distribution centered around parsimonious solutions, and statistical supports on ancestral and extant adjacencies are provided. DeCoSTAR supports the features of previously contributed tools that reconstruct ancestral adjacencies, namely DeCo, DeCoLT, ART-DeCo, and DeClone. In a few minutes, DeCoSTAR can reconstruct the evolutionary history of domains inside genes, of gene fusion and fission events, or of gene order along chromosomes, for large data sets including dozens of whole genomes from all kingdoms of life.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/YoannAnselmetti/DeCoSTAR_pipeline

shovill: Assemble bacterial isolate genomes from Illumina paired-end reads

BioStar — Sat, 02 Jan 2021 07:05:36 -0600

Shovill is a pipeline which uses SPAdes at its core, but alters the steps before and after the primary assembly step to get similar results in less time. Shovill also supports other assemblers like SKESA, Velvet and Megahit, so you can take advantage of the pre- and post-processing the Shovill provides with those too.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/tseemann/shovill

Recovery of complete genomes from metagenomes

Jit — Wed, 27 Dec 2017 00:04:55 -0600

This project contains scripts and tutorials on how to assemble individual microbial genomes from metagenomes, as described in:

Genome sequences of rare, uncultured bacteria obtained by differential coverage binning of multiple metagenomes

Mads Albertsen, Philip Hugenholtz, Adam Skarshewski, Gene W. Tyson, Kåre L. Nielsen and Per .H. Nielsen

Nature Biotechnology 2013, doi: 10.1038/nbt.2579

Address of the bookmark: http://madsalbertsen.github.io/multi-metagenome/

Digest: In silico restriction digest of complete genomes

Jit — Mon, 14 May 2018 04:02:52 -0500

This tool allows to retrieve number of cleavages yielded by commercially available endonucleases in up-to-date sequenced prokaryotic genomes. When the number of fragments is bellow 50, Pulse Field gel Electrophoresis (PFGE) is simulated.

A tool for restriction digest of longuser's sequences is available.

Address of the bookmark: http://insilico.ehu.es/digest/

GTDB-Tk: A toolkit for assigning objective taxonomic classifications to bacterial and archaeal genomes.

Rahul Nayak — Wed, 22 Aug 2018 03:21:01 -0500

GTDB-Tk is a software toolkit for assigning objective taxonomic classifications to bacterial and archaeal genomes. It is computationally efficient and designed to work with recent advances that allow hundreds or thousands of metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs) to be obtained directly from environmental samples. It can also be applied to isolate and single-cell genomes. The GTDB-Tk is open source and released under the GNU General Public License (Version 3).

GTDB-Tk is under active development and validation. Please independently confirm the GTDB-Tk predictions by manually inspecting the tree and bringing any discrepencies to our attention. Notifications about GTDB-Tk releases will be available through the ACE Twitter account (https://twitter.com/ace_uq).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/Ecogenomics/GTDBTk

MFannot : a program for the annotation of mitochondrial and plastid genomes

Jit — Mon, 26 Aug 2019 11:47:56 -0500

MFannot is a program for the annotation of mitochondrial and plastid genomes

MFannot is a program for the annotation of mitochondrial and plastid genomes. It is a PERL wrapper around a set of diverse, external independent tools.

It makes intense use of RNA/intron detection tools including HMMER, Exonerate, Erpin and others.

http://megasun.bch.umontreal.ca/cgi-bin/mfannot/mfannotInterface.pl

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/BFL-lab/Mfannot

CAT/BAT: tool for taxonomic classification of contigs and metagenome-assembled genomes (MAGs)

Jit — Mon, 18 May 2020 10:53:32 -0500

Contig Annotation Tool (CAT) and Bin Annotation Tool (BAT) are pipelines for the taxonomic classification of long DNA sequences and metagenome assembled genomes (MAGs/bins) of both known and (highly) unknown microorganisms, as generated by contemporary metagenomics studies. The core algorithm of both programs involves gene calling, mapping of predicted ORFs against the nr protein database, and voting-based classification of the entire contig / MAG based on classification of the individual ORFs. CAT and BAT can be run from intermediate steps if files are formated appropriately (see Usage).

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/dutilh/CAT