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Updated: Aug 22, 2026

Targeted Next-generation Sequencing and Bioinformatics Pipeline to Evaluate Genetic Determinants of Constitutional Disease
Published on: April 4, 2018
Base-pair resolution conservation data improves cell type specific sequence-to-expression prediction
Pooja Kathail1, Forest Yang2, Gabriel B Loeb3
1Center for Computational Biology, University of California, Berkeley, Berkeley, CA, 94720, USA.
Motivation:
Genomic sequence-to-activity models can decipher gene regulatory mechanisms and predict the functional impact of regulatory variants. However, current models struggle to integrate information from sequences outside promoters, especially information from cell type specific regulatory elements.
Results:
Here, we propose incorporating base-pair resolution evolutionary conservation data into genomic sequence-to-expression predictors. We explore two training strategies-training from scratch or fine-tuning an existing sequence-only model with additional conservation input. We find that in both cases, base-pair resolution conservation data improves cell type specific sequence-to-expression prediction, with training from scratch yielding the greatest benefit. The improvement in cell type specific expression prediction can be attributed in part to the fact that models trained on sequence and conservation data learn to better recognize cell type specific regulatory elements than models trained on sequence alone.
Availability:
Code is available at https://github.com/ni-lab/basenji-phyloP.
Supplementary Information:
Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.
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