Carnegie Mellon University
November 05, 2024

Andreas Pfenning Publishes Commentary in Nature

In a recently published paper in Nature “Machine-guided design of cell-type-targeting cis-regulator elements”, Sager Gosai wrote about applying artificial intelligence (AI) methods to learn the “regulatory grammar” of cells’ genomic language.  The authors applied those models to create synthetic DNA sequences.  Recently, Nature released an article written by Ray and Stephanie Lane Computational Biology Department’s Associate Professor Andreas Pfenning called “AI-designed DNA sequences regulate cell-type-specific gene expression”, where he expands on Gosai’s paper in the context of a larger field.

Pfenning explained that “there are articles coming out on advanced AI methods for biology. There are also articles coming on new high-throughput experimental methods. What is exciting about this article is that it is able to connect the two – integrating the AI and the experimental component.”

We can expect to link the new approaches to CMU’s initiatives in AI for science and the newly developed Cloud Lab, Archimedes, Pfenning said.