Find Central Dogma Again: Leveraging Multilingual Transfer in Large Language Models

Abstract

In recent years, large language models (LLMs) have achieved state-of-the-art results in various biological sequence analysis tasks, such as sequence classification, structure prediction, and function prediction. Similar to advancements in AI for other scientific fields, deeper research into biological LLMs has begun to focus on using these models to rediscover important existing biological laws or uncover entirely new patterns in biological sequences. This study leverages GPT-like LLMs to utilize language transfer capabilities to rediscover the genetic code rules of the central dogma. In our experimental design, we transformed the central dogma into a binary classification problem of aligning DNA sequences with protein sequences, where positive examples are matching DNA and protein sequences, and negative examples are non-matching pairs. We first trained a GPT-2 model from scratch using a dataset comprising protein sequences, DNA sequences, and sequences from languages such as English and Chinese. Subsequently, we fine-tuned the model using the natural language sentences similarity judgment dataset from PAWS-X. When tested on a dataset for DNA and protein sequence alignment judgment, the fine-tuned model achieved a classification accuracy of 81%. The study also analyzed factors contributing to this zero-shot capability, including model training stability and types of training data. This research demonstrates that LLMs can, through the transfer of natural language capabilities and solely relying on the analysis of sequences themselves, rediscover the central dogma without prior knowledge of it. This study bridges natural language and genetic language, opening a new door for AI-driven biological research.