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.

Comparison of Short Read De Novo Alignment Algorithms

Rahul Agarwal — Wed, 21 Aug 2013 07:56:01 -0500

Excellent article to introduce different sequencing methods along with tools for de novo assembly of sequencing reads and their relevant references.

Title: Comparison of Short Read De Novo Alignment Algorithms

Author: Nikhil Gopal

Address of the bookmark: http://biochem218.stanford.edu/Projects%202011/Gopal%202011.pdf

3d-dna: 3D de novo assembly (3D DNA) pipeline

Jit — Thu, 28 Dec 2017 10:09:37 -0600

This code is designed to enable anyone to reproduce the Hs2-HiC and the AaegL4 genomes reported in: Dudchenko et al., De novo assembly of the Aedes aegypti genome using Hi-C yields chromosome-length scaffolds. Science, 2017.

Unless otherwise noted, all terminology below is consistent with this paper, and all references to figures and tables in this readme refer to this paper. Specifically, some of the terminology used below is outlined in Figure S2. The assembly procedure is described in detail in the Supporting Online Materials, specifically in the section labelled “Pipeline description”.

In addition, the pipeline uses tools and methods from Juicer (Durand & Shamim et al., Cell Systems, 2016) and Juicebox (Durand & Robinson et al., Cell Systems, 2016), as well as additional dependencies noted below.

Feel free to post your questions and comments at: http://www.aidenlab.org/forum.html

http://aidenlab.org/documentation.html

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/theaidenlab/3d-dna

ALPACA: A hybrid strategy for assembly of genomic DNA shotgun sequencing reads.

Seema Singh — Mon, 30 Apr 2018 04:38:40 -0500

ALPACA requires Celera Assembler 8.3 or later. It is recommended to build Celera Assembler from source. (Why? The pre-built binaries CA_8.3rc1 and CA8.3rc2 will work for any large data set.

Detail paper at https://bmcgenomics.biomedcentral.com/articles/10.1186/s12864-017-3927-8

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/VicugnaPacos/ALPACA

PERGA: A Paired-End Read Guided De Novo Assembler for Extending Contigs Using SVM and Look Ahead Approach

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 05 Jun 2018 09:57:11 -0500

PERGA - Paired End Reads Guided Assembler PERGA is a novel sequence reads guided de novo assembly approach which adopts greedy-like prediction strategy for assembling reads to contigs and scaffolds. Instead of using single-end reads to construct contig, PERGA uses paired-end reads and different read overlap sizes from O ≥ Omax to Omin to resolve the gaps and branches. Moreover, by constructing a decision model using machine learning approach based on branch features, PERGA can determine the correct extension in 99.7% of cases. PERGA will try to extend the contigs by all feasible nucleotides and determine if these multiple extensions due to sequencing errors or repeats by using looking ahead technology, and it also try to separate the different repeats of nearby genomic regions to make the assembly result more longer and accurate. The simulated E.coli paired-end reads data are generated using GemSim (KE McElroy, F Luciani, T Thomas. Gemsim: General, Error-Model Based Simulator of Next-Generation Sequencing Data. BMC Genomics 2012, 13:74), with coverage 50x, 60x, 100x, read lengths 100-bp, and can be downloaded from https://github.com/zhuxiao/data_PERGA.

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/hitbio/PERGA

ASplice: a scalable and memory-efficient algorithm for de novo transcriptome assembly

Rahul Nayak — Tue, 03 Jul 2018 04:09:46 -0500

With increased availability of de novo assembly algorithms, it is feasible to study entire transcriptomes of non-model organisms. While algorithms are available that are specifically designed for performing transcriptome assembly from high-throughput sequencing data, they are very memory-intensive, limiting their applications to small data sets with few libraries. Texas A&M University researchers develop a transcriptome assembly algorithm that recovers alternatively spliced isoforms and expression levels while utilizing as many RNA-Seq libraries as possible that contain hundreds of gigabases of data. New techniques are developed so that computations can be performed on a computing cluster with moderate amount of physical memory. Availability – A software program that implements the algorithm is available at: http://faculty.cse.tamu.edu/shsze/asplice. Sze SH, Pimsler ML, Tomberlin JK, Jones CD, Tarone AM. (2017) A scalable and memory-efficient algorithm for de novo transcriptome assembly of non-model organisms. BMC Genomics 18(Suppl 4):387.

Address of the bookmark: http://faculty.cse.tamu.edu/shsze/asplice/

MEGAHIT: an ultra-fast single-node solution for large and complex metagenomics assembly via succinct de Bruijn graph

Jit — Wed, 14 Nov 2018 04:50:27 -0600

MEGAHIT is a single node assembler for large and complex metagenomics NGS reads, such as soil. It makes use of succinct de Bruijn graph (SdBG) to achieve low memory assembly. MEGAHIT can optionally utilize a CUDA-enabled GPU to accelerate its SdBG contstruction. The GPU-accelerated version of MEGAHIT has been tested on NVIDIA GTX680 (4G memory) and Tesla K40c (12G memory) with CUDA 5.5, 6.0 and 6.5. MEGAHIT v1.0 or greater also supports IBM Power PC and has been tested on IBM POWER8.

https://academic.oup.com/bioinformatics/article/31/10/1674/177884

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/voutcn/megahit

NxRepair: error correction in de novo assemblies using Nextera Mate Pair Reads

BioStar — Thu, 24 Jan 2019 10:35:12 -0600

NxRepair is a python module that automatically detects large structural errors in de novo assemblies using Nextera mate pair reads. The decector will break a contig at the site of an identified misassembly and will generate a new fasta file containing both the corrected contigs and the correct, unaffected contigs.

https://nxrepair.readthedocs.io/en/latest/tutorial.html

nxrepair aligned_matepairs.bam assemblyfasta.fasta error_locations.csv new_fasta.fasta

Address of the bookmark: https://github.com/rebeccaroisin/nxrepair

SDA: Long-read sequence and assembly of segmental duplications

Jit — Tue, 05 Mar 2019 10:00:57 -0600

Segmental Duplication Assembler (SDA; https://github.com/mvollger/SDA) constructs graphs in which paralogous sequence variants define the nodes and long-read sequences provide attraction and repulsion edges, enabling the partition and assembly of long reads corresponding to distinct paralogs.

https://github.com/mvollger/SDA

Address of the bookmark: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41592-018-0236-3

CONTIGuator !

BioStar — Fri, 04 Oct 2019 01:27:58 -0500

CONTIGuator is a Python script for Linux environments whose purpose is to speed-up the bacterial genome assembly process and to obtain a first insight of the genome structure using the well-known artemis comparison tool (ACT).

Address of the bookmark: https://sourceforge.net/projects/contiguator/