PlantCAD2: A DNA foundation model for interpreting genomes across flowering plants.

PlantCAD2, a plant-specific DNA language model with 676 million parameters, outperforms larger models in 10 of 12 tasks across flowering plants.

• Why it matters: Understanding plant genomes is crucial due to their vast diversity and complex regulation, yet existing models struggle to accurately interpret these genomes across species.
• What they did: They trained PlantCAD2 on 65 angiosperm genomes, evaluated it with public benchmarks, and fine-tuned it for cross-species tasks, leveraging an 8,192-base pair context window.
• The result: PlantCAD2 significantly improves predictions of chromatin accessibility and gene regulation, enabling more accurate annotation and interpretation of plant genomes across diverse species.