Generative and interpretable machine learning for aptamer design and analysis of in vitro sequence selection

Selection protocols such as SELEX, where molecules are selected over multiple rounds for their ability to bind to a target molecule of interest, are popular methods for obtaining binders for diagnostic and therapeutic purposes. With the increasing amount of such high-throughput experimental data available, machine learning techniques have become increasingly popular for molecular datasets analysis. Here, we show that Restricted Boltzmann Machines (RBMs), a two-layer neural network architecture, can successfully be trained on sequence ensembles from SELEX experiments for thrombin aptamers, and used to estimate the fitness of the sequences obtained through the experimental protocol. As a direct consequence, we show that trained RBMs can be exploited to classify as well as generate novel molecules. To confirm our findings, we experimentally verify the generated sequences from RBM.