Aditi Merchant (@aditimerch) / X

Aditi Merchant

33 posts

Aditi Merchant

@aditimerch

BioE PhD student @stanford in the Hie Lab // ML for SynBio

Joined April 2020

Pinned
Aditi Merchant
@aditimerch
Nov 19, 2025
What if we could autocomplete DNA based on function? Today in @Nature, we share semantic design—a strategy for function-guided design with genomic language models that leverages genomic context to create de novo genes with desired functions.🧵 nature.com/articles/s4158…
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Aditi Merchant
@aditimerch
Dec 18, 2024
Excited to have the first project of my PhD out!!! By leveraging Evo's ability to learn relationships across genes (i.e., "know a gene by the company it keeps"), we show that we can engineer highly divergent proteins with retained functionality. 🧵1/3
Brian Hie
@BrianHie
Dec 18, 2024
In new work led by @aditimerch with @samuelhking, we prompt engineer Evo to perform function-guided protein design with high experimental success rates, including designs that go beyond natural sequences. We also release SynGenome, the first AI-generated genomics database. 🧵 1/N
GIF
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Aditi Merchant
@aditimerch
Dec 18, 2024
Replying to @aditimerch
Were able to use this approach, which we term "semantic mining", to generate several functional proteins, including full toxin-antitoxin systems (!) and novel anti-CRISPRs with no significant homology to known anti-CRISPRs (!) 🧵2/N
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Aditi Merchant
@aditimerch
Dec 18, 2024
Replying to @aditimerch
This work was a big collaborative effort and would not have been possible without the amazing @samuelhking, @exnx, and, of course, @BrianHie! Really excited to see all the amazing things mined using this approach! 🧵3/3
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Aditi Merchant
@aditimerch
Dec 18, 2024
Replying to @samuelhking @BrianHie and @exnx
Could not have done any of it without your help!!
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