| Popis: |
Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, the virus has mutated in ways that affect its ability to infect people, cause severe disease, and escape immunity. It can be costly and time-consuming to experimentally study viral mutations. Sequencing genetic code is cheaper, and millions of SARS-CoV-2 genome sequences are available. With the quickly changing dynamics of SARS-CoV-2 evolution and patient outcomes, we need fast ways to translate sequence data to biologically meaningful and clinically relevant information. Inspired by advances in natural language processing, we design a deep learning architecture that can be visualized at multiple scales to interpret trained models. We train a model to predict the risk of severe disease based on genetic changes in the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein, which plays a key role in infection and immune response. Trained solely on spike protein sequences from pre-Omicron infections (i.e., acquired before any empirical data for Omicron was available), the model predicts Omicron sequences with a reduced risk of severe disease (by 40-50%) relative to Delta. Testing on Omicron sequences collected so far, the deep learning model’s predictions agree with real world observations, suggesting that the methodology can be applied to future variants. |
