Card deck

Evo: a model that designs molecular machines

Evo is a 7-billion-parameter genomic foundation model trained on microbial and viral genomes, reading DNA, RNA and protein together. It predicts how mutations change function and, by generating new sequences, designs working molecular systems like CRISPR-Cas and jumping genes, some tested in the lab. The 2024 model that Evo 2 later scaled to all of life.

Genomics × AIPaper

1 / 10 Evo: a model that designs molecular machines

A ten-slide breakdown of Evo, the first genome designer: how the StripedHyena architecture reads 131,000 bases at single-nucleotide resolution, why a next-token model trained on 2.7 million microbial and viral genomes can both predict function and generate new sequences, and how Evo designed CRISPR-Cas systems and transposons that worked in the lab.

Read the paper: Sequence modeling and design from molecular to genome scale with Evo (Science, 2024).