Deep metric learning improves lab of origin prediction of genetically engineered plasmids

Genome engineering is undergoing unprecedented development and is now becoming widely available. To ensure responsible biotechnology innovation and to reduce misuse of engineered DNA sequences, it is vital to develop tools to identify the lab-of-origin of engineered plasmids. Genetic engineering attribution (GEA), the ability to make sequence-lab associations, would support forensic experts in this process. Here, we propose a method, based on metric learning, that ranks the most likely labs-of-origin whilst simultaneously generating embeddings for plasmid sequences and labs. These embeddings can be used to perform various downstream tasks, such as clustering DNA sequences and labs, as well as using them as features in machine learning models.