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This content will become publicly available on July 1, 2025

Title: Variant Effect Prediction in the Age of Machine Learning
Over the years, many computational methods have been created for the analysis of the impact of single amino acid substitutions resulting from single-nucleotide variants in genome coding regions. Historically, all methods have been supervised and thus limited by the inadequate sizes of experimentally curated data sets and by the lack of a standardized definition of variant effect. The emergence of unsupervised, deep learning (DL)-based methods raised an important question: Canmachines learn the language of life fromthe unannotated protein sequence data well enough to identify significant errors in the protein “sentences”? Our analysis suggests that some unsupervised methods perform as well or better than existing supervised methods. Unsupervised methods are also faster and can, thus, be useful in large-scale variant evaluations. For all other methods, however, their performance varies by both evaluation metrics and by the type of variant effect being predicted.We also note that the evaluation of method performance is still lacking on less-studied, nonhuman proteins where unsupervised methods hold the most promise.  more » « less
Award ID(s):
2318829 2310114 2310113
PAR ID:
10523474
Author(s) / Creator(s):
; ; ;
Publisher / Repository:
Cold Spring Harbor: Perspectives in Biology
Date Published:
Journal Name:
Cold Spring Harbor Perspectives in Biology
Volume:
16
Issue:
7
ISSN:
1943-0264
Page Range / eLocation ID:
a041467
Format(s):
Medium: X
Sponsoring Org:
National Science Foundation
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