Tootfinder

Multimodal Modeling of CRISPR-Cas12 Activity Using Foundation Models and Chromatin Accessibility Data
Azim Dehghani Amirabad, Yanfei Zhang, Artem Moskalev, Sowmya Rajesh, Tommaso Mansi, Shuwei Li, Mangal Prakash, Rui Liao
https://arxiv.org/abs/2506.11182

Multimodal Modeling of CRISPR-Cas12 Activity Using Foundation Models and Chromatin Accessibility Data
Predicting guide RNA (gRNA) activity is critical for effective CRISPR-Cas12 genome editing but remains challenging due to limited data, variation across protospacer adjacent motifs (PAMs-short sequence requirements for Cas binding), and reliance on large-scale training. We investigate whether pre-trained biological foundation model originally trained on transcriptomic data can improve gRNA activity estimation even without domain-specific pre-training. Using embeddings from existing RNA foundati…