Absci Corporation
Climate Impact & Sustainability Data (2023)
Reporting Period: 2023
Environmental Metrics
Climate Goals & Targets
Environmental Challenges
- Increasing recombinant protein expression is of broad interest in industrial biotechnology, synthetic biology, and basic research. Existing codon optimization tools may yield suboptimal DNA sequences that transcribe well in the host, but impede proper folding of the recombinant protein during translation. Alternatively, existing tools may yield sequences that enable proper folding but limit the stability and expression level of the transcribed mRNA, resulting in diminished yields of functional, soluble protein.
Mitigation Strategies
- Developed deep contextual language models that learn the codon usage rules from natural protein coding sequences across members of the Enterobacterales order. Fine-tuned these models with over 150,000 functional expression measurements of synonymous coding sequences from three proteins to predict expression in E. coli. The models predict expression level of unseen sequence variants with high accuracy and can be used to design CDSs for optimal functional expression of proteins.