posted on 2024-03-12, 07:43authored byAaron Adler, Joel S. Bader, Brian Basnight, Benjamin W. Booth, Jitong Cai, Elizabeth Cho, Joseph H. Collins, Yuchen Ge, John Grothendieck, Kevin Keating, Tyler Marshall, Anton Persikov, Helen Scott, Roy Siegelmann, Mona Singh, Allison Taggart, Benjamin Toll, Kenneth H. Wan, Daniel Wyschogrod, Fusun Yaman, Eric M. Young, Susan E. Celniker, Nicholas Roehner
Synthetic
biology is creating genetically engineered
organisms
at an increasing rate for many potentially valuable applications,
but this potential comes with the risk of misuse or accidental release.
To begin to address this issue, we have developed a system called
GUARDIAN that can automatically detect signatures of engineering in
DNA sequencing data, and we have conducted a blinded test of this
system using a curated Test and Evaluation (T&E) data set. GUARDIAN
uses an ensemble approach based on the guiding principle that no single
approach is likely to be able to detect engineering with perfect accuracy.
Critically, ensembling enables GUARDIAN to detect sequence inserts
in 13 target organisms with a high degree of specificity that requires
no subject matter expert (SME) review.