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BarcodeBERT: transformers for biodiversity analyses

delete2026-01-01
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PRE
AI
P
Pablo Millán Arias
N
Niousha Sadjadi
M
Monireh Safari
Z
ZeMing Gong
A
Austin T. Wang
J
Joakim Bruslund Haurum
I
Iuliia Zarubiieva
S
Steinke, Dirk
L
Lila Kari *
C
Chang, Angel X.
S
Scott Lowe
G
Graham W. Taylor *
DOI:10.1093/bioadv/vbag054delete
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Abstract

Abstract

En 中文
Motivation In the global effort to characterize biodiversity, short species-specific genomic sequences known as DNA barcodes enable fine-grained comparisons among organisms within the same kingdom of life. Although machine learning algorithms specifically designed for the analysis of DNA barcodes are becoming more popular, most existing methodologies rely on generic supervised training algorithms.Results We introduce BarcodeBERT, a family of models tailored to biodiversity analysis and trained exclusively on data from a reference library of 1.5 M invertebrate DNA barcodes. We evaluate BarcodeBERT on taxonomic identification tasks against a spectrum of machine learning approaches, including supervised training of classical neural architectures and fine-tuning of general DNA foundation models. Our self-supervised pretraining strategies on domain-specific data outperform fine-tuned foundation models, especially in identification tasks involving lower taxa such as genera and species. Compared with BLAST, a widely used sequence-search tool, BarcodeBERT achieves comparable species-level classification accuracy while being 55 & times; faster. Our analysis of masking and tokenization strategies also provides practical guidance for building customized DNA language models, emphasizing the importance of aligning model training strategies with dataset characteristics and domain knowledge.Availability and implementation The code repository is available at https://github.com/bioscan-ml/BarcodeBERT.
Keywords:
ALIGNMENT

Journal

B
Bioinformatics Advances
IF:
2.8
Papers:
131
Citations:
0

Organization

V
Vector Institute for Artificial Intelligence
Scholars:
217
Papers: 164
Citations: 4
S
simon fraser university
Scholars:
1.7K
Papers: 891
Citations: 0
A
aalborg university
Scholars:
1.6W
Papers: 1.7W
Citations: 22
U
university of waterloo
Scholars:
2.6K
Papers: 1.4K
Citations: 1
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Cited Papers

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The Nucleotide Transformer: Building and Evaluating Robust Foundation Models for Human Genomics
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errHugo Dalla-Torre; Liam Gonzalez; Javier Mendoza Revilla; Nicolas Lopez Carranza; Adam Henryk Grywaczewski; Francesco Oteri; Christian Dallago; Evan Trop; Bernardo P De Almeida; Hassan Sirelkhatim; Guillaume Richard; Marcin Skwark; Karim Beguir; Marie Lopez; Thomas Pierrot
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A reference library for Canadian invertebrates with 1.5 million barcodes, voucher specimens, and DNA samples
err2019-12-06
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errOAAI
errJeremy R. deWaard; Sujeevan Ratnasingham; Evgeny V. Zakharov; Alex V. Borisenko; Dirk Steinke; Angela C. Telfer; Kate H. J. Perez; Jayme E. Sones; Monica R. Young; Valerie Levesque-Beaudin; Crystal N. Sobel; Arusyak Abrahamyan; Kyrylo Bessonov; Gergin Blagoev; Stephanie L. deWaard; Chris Ho; Natalia V. Ivanova; Kara K. S. Layton; Liuqiong Lu; Ramya Manjunath; Jaclyn T. A. McKeown; Megan A. Milton; Renee Miskie; Norm Monkhouse; Suresh Naik; Nadya Nikolova; Mikko Pentinsaari; Sean W. J. Prosser; Adriana E. Radulovici; Claudia Steinke; Connor P. Warne; Paul D. N. Hebert
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Biological identifications through DNA barcodes
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errHebert, PDN; Cywinska, A; Ball, SL; DeWaard, JR
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DNABERT-S: pioneering species differentiation with species-aware DNA embeddings
err2025-07-01
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errZhou, Zhihan; Wu, Weimin; Ho, Harrison; Wang, Jiayi; Shi, Lizhen; Davuluri, Ramana, V; Wang, Zhong; Liu, Han
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Arthropod Diversity in a Tropical Forest
err2012-12-14
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errYves Basset; Lukas Cizek; Philippe Cuénoud; Raphael K. Didham; François Guilhaumon; Olivier Missa; Vojtech Novotny; Frode Ødegaard; Tomas Roslin; Jürgen Schmidl; Alexey K. Tishechkin; Neville N. Winchester; David W. Roubik; Henri-Pierre Aberlenc; Johannes Bail; Héctor Barrios; Jon R. Bridle; Gabriela Castaño-Meneses; Bruno Corbara; Gianfranco Curletti; Wesley Duarte da Rocha; Domir De Bakker; Jacques H. C. Delabie; Alain Dejean; Laura L. Fagan; Andreas Floren; Roger L. Kitching; Enrique Medianero; Scott E. Miller; Evandro Gama de Oliveira; Jérôme Orivel; Marc Pollet; Mathieu Rapp; Sérvio P. Ribeiro; Yves Roisin; Jesper B. Schmidt; Line Sørensen; Maurice Leponce
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