Researchers at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory have developed an artificial intelligence (AI) powered virtual laboratory called CREME (cis-regulatory element model explanations). This innovative tool allows geneticists to run thousands of virtual experiments with the click of a button, enabling them to identify and understand key regions of the genome.
The team, led by assistant professor Peter Koo, PhD, reported on their development of CREME in Nature Genetics. They stated that the tool provides high-resolution insights into the regulatory architecture of the genome, offering interpretations across multiple scales from cis-regulatory elements to fine-mapped functional sequence elements within them.
CREME draws inspiration from CRISPRi, a genetic perturbation technique based on CRISPR technology. This AI-powered in silico perturbation toolkit interprets the rules of gene regulation learned by genomic deep neural networks (DNNs), enabling CRE- level analysis similar to CRISPRi perturbations.
Koo and his team tested CREME on another AI-powered DNN genome analysis tool called Enformer, uncovering a series of genetic rules that the model learned while analyzing the genome. This insight may one day prove invaluable for drug discovery.
With further fine-tuning, CREME may set geneticists on the path to discovering new therapeutic targets and even give scientists without access to a real laboratory the power to make breakthroughs.
Source: https://www.genengnews.com/topics/artificial-intelligence/crispr-creme-an-ai-treat-to-enable-virtual-genomic-experiments/