Scientists from A*STAR's Genome Institute of Singapore (GIS) have developed a new tool, named Bambu, which uses artificial intelligence to identify and characterize new genes, enabling an adaptable analysis across various species and samples. With a better understanding of which and how genes are expressed in samples, Bambu provides a better understanding of how cells function.
This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies . Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Bambu enables simultaneous transcript discovery and quantification from Nanopore RNA-seq data. Credit: Nature Methods (2023). DOI: 10.1038/s41592-023-01908-w It is a long-read RNA sequencing tool that can be used in both clinical and research settings to discover how DNA encodes novel transcripts and quantifies them. This innovative tool is named after the bamboo plant, which has extremely long reeds that are analogous to the long reads that Bambu uses. A study detailing the methodology and evaluation of Bambu was published in Nature Methods. The human genome, which comprises 3.2 billion letters, also known as base pairs, is dwarfed by the lungfish genome with 43 billion, and even more so by the Japanese flower Pari japonica with 149 billion base pairs. Despite a human's relatively smaller genome, there are over 140,000 unique ways genes are encoded within—also referred to as a gene's transcripts—and given the complexity of the body's organs, life stages and responses to perturbations such as diseases, it is estimated that there are many yet to be identified. This is not only limited to humans, as scientists have been researching…