Researchers and scientists are always curious to explore the ever-evolving world of science with cutting-edge technology.
One such technology that is transforming biological research is BioAutoMATED. It is an end-to-end automated machine-learning tool that can explain and design biological sequences. A group of scientists at the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering at Harvard University and MIT developed it.
This new AutoML platform is designed for biologists with little or no Machine Learning (ML) experience called ‘BioAutoMATED’. According to https://www.cell.com/cell-systems/fulltext, this platform integrates multiple open-source AutoML methods into a unified framework. Users can automatically be provided with relevant techniques for analyzing, interpreting, and designing biological sequences.
“Our tool is for folks who don’t have the ability to build their own custom ML models, who find themselves asking questions like, ‘I have this cool data set, will ML even work for it? How do I get it into an ML model? The complexity of ML is what’s stopping me from going further with this data set, so how do I overcome that?’”, said co-first author Jackie Valeri, a graduate student in the lab of Wyss Core Faculty member Jim Collins, Ph.D. “We wanted to make it easy for biologists and experts in other domains to use the power of ML and AutoML to answer fundamental questions and help uncover biology that means something.”
BioAutoMATED predicts gene regulation, peptide-drug interactions, and glycan annotation and designs optimized synthetic biology components, revealing salient sequence characteristics.
To demonstrate the utility of their platform, the team evaluated BioAutoMATED by testing and deploying ML models based on a wide range of datasets relevant to gene regulation, peptide-drug interactions, and glycan annotation. And it produced standardized output outcomes for all 3 tools so the user can compare & determine which type produces the most useful insights from the data collected.
”Machine learning and artificial intelligence tools have been around for a while now, but it’s only with the recent development of user-friendly interfaces that they’ve exploded in popularity, as in the case of ChatGPT,” said Collins. “We hope that BioAutoMATED can enable the next generation of biologists to faster and more easily discover the underpinnings of life.”
As BioAutoMATED continues to evolve, it empowers scientists to push the boundaries of biochemical research and catalyze breakthroughs.
