Skip to main content
Log in

Using metric learning to identify the lab-of-origin of engineered DNA

  • Research Briefing
  • Published:

From Nature Computational Science

View current issue Submit your manuscript

Determining the origin of engineered DNA can help to foster responsible innovation within the biotechnology community. A convolutional neural network approach that learns distances between engineered DNA sequences and various labs that could have created them is used to accurately predict the lab-of-origin.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this article

Price excludes VAT (USA)
Tax calculation will be finalised during checkout.

Instant access to the full article PDF.

Fig. 1: Identifying the lab-of-origin of DNA sequences.

References

  1. Nielsen, A. A. & Voigt, C. A. Deep learning to predict the lab-of-origin of engineered DNA. Nat. Commun. 9, 3135 (2018). The first study to predict the lab of origin of engineered DNA using deep learning.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  2. Alley, E. C. et al. A machine learning toolkit for genetic engineering attribution to facilitate biosecurity. Nat. Commun. 11, 6293 (2020). An article that presents a recurrent neural network approach to predicting the lab-of-origin.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  3. Wang, Q., Kille, B., Liu, T. R., Elworth, R. A. L. & Treangen, T. J. Plasmidhawk improves lab of origin prediction of engineered plasmids using sequence alignment. Nat. Commun. 12, 1167 (2021). An article that presents a pan-genome method for lab-of-origin prediction and previous state-of-the-art.

    Article  Google Scholar 

  4. Hoffer, E. & Ailon, N. Deep metric learning using triplet network. In Similarity-Based Pattern Recognition. SIMBAD 2015. Lecture Notes in Computer Science Vol. 9370 (eds Feragen, A. et al.) 84–92 (Springer, 2015). The first paper to propose deep metric learning using the triplet network model.

  5. Fei-Fei, L., Fergus, R. & Perona, P. One-shot learning of object categories. IEEE Trans. Pattern Anal. Mach. Intell. 28, 594–611 (2006). An article that presents the possibility of training deep algorithms with few samples (few-shot) or one sample (one-shot).

    Article  Google Scholar 

Download references

Additional information

Publisher’s note Springer Nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations.

This is a summary of: Soares, I. M. et al. Improving lab-of-origin prediction of genetically engineered plasmids via deep metric learning. Nat. Comput. Sci. https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-022-00234-z (2022).

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

About this article

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this article

Using metric learning to identify the lab-of-origin of engineered DNA. Nat Comput Sci 2, 296–297 (2022). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-022-00240-1

Download citation

  • Published:

  • Issue Date:

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s43588-022-00240-1

  • Springer Nature America, Inc.

Navigation