Direct discovery · Biology · Computer science
Evo genomic model produces functional de novo genes
Experimentally active de novo anti-CRISPR proteins and toxin–antitoxin systems generated from genomic context, including sequences lacking significant similarity to known proteins.
Summary
Merchant and colleagues show that Evo can use prokaryotic genomic context to generate functional genes, including anti-CRISPR proteins and toxin–antitoxin systems with limited or no significant similarity to known proteins. The generated sequences were tested experimentally and the authors released a large synthetic-sequence resource.
AI role
The Evo genomic language model generated novel gene sequences conditioned on genomic-context prompts for desired biological functions.
Narrative role
This is a distinct direct-discovery follow-up to the existing Evo 2 model milestone because it demonstrates experimentally active, function-guided genomic designs rather than foundation-model scaling alone.
Caveat
The validation concerns prokaryotic functions and selected assays; many generated sequences can be non-functional, and genomic-context conditioning does not yet generalize to most eukaryotic design tasks.