Off the deep end: What can deep learning do for the gene expression field?

After a COVID-related hiatus, the fifth biennial symposium on Evolution and Core Processes in Gene Regulation met at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, Missouri July 21 to 24, 2022. This symposium, sponsored by the American Society for Biochemistry and Molecular Biology (ASBMB), featured ex-perts in gene regulation and evolutionary biology. Topic areas covered enhancer evolution, the cis-regulatory code, and reg-ulatory variation, with an overall focus on bringing the power of deep learning (DL) to decipher DNA sequence information. DL is a machine learning method that uses neural networks to learn complex rules that make predictions about diverse types of data. When DL models are trained to predict genomic data from DNA sequence information, their high prediction accu-racy allows the identification of impactful genetic variants within and across species. In addition, the learned sequence rules can be extracted from the model and provide important clues about the mechanistic underpinnings of the cis-regula-tory code.

Automated summary

The fifth biennial symposium on Evolution and Core Processes in Gene Regulation, sponsored by ASBMB, was held at the Stowers Institute in Kansas City, Missouri from July 21 to 24, 2022. The symposium brought together experts in gene regulation and evolutionary biology to discuss topics such as enhancer evolution, the cis-regulatory code, and regulatory variation, with a focus on utilizing deep learning to decipher DNA sequence information.