Abstract Natural products are chemical compounds that form the basis of many therapeutics used in the pharmaceutical industry. In microbes, natural products are synthesized by groups of colocalized genes called biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs). With advances in high-throughput sequencing, there has been an increase of complete microbial isolate genomes and metagenomes, from which a vast number of BGCs are undiscovered. Here, we introduce a self-supervised learning approach designed to identify and characterize BGCs from such data. To do this, we represent BGCs as chains of functional protein domains and train a masked language model on these domains. We assess the ability of our approach to detect BGCs and characterize BGC properties in bacterial genomes. We also demonstrate that our model can learn meaningful representations of BGCs and their constituent domains, detect BGCs in microbial genomes, and predict BGC product classes. These results highlight self-supervised neural networks as a promising framework for improving BGC prediction and classification. Author summary Biosynthetic gene clusters (BGCs) encode for natural products of diverse chemical structures and function, but they are often difficult to discover and characterize. Many bioinformatic and deep learning approaches have leveraged the abundance of genomic data to recognize BGCs in bacterial genomes. However, the characterization of BGC properties remains the main bottleneck in identifying novel BGCs and their natural products. In this paper, we present a self-supervised masked language model that learns meaningful representations of BGCs with improved downstream detection and classification.

Deep self-supervised learning for biosynthetic gene cluster detection and product classification