Papers › Deep learning models for predicting RNA degradation via dual crowdsourcing

Deep learning models for predicting RNA degradation via dual crowdsourcing

14 Oct 2021arXiv:2110.07531archive 2025-07-28

Hannah K. Wayment-Steele, Wipapat Kladwang, Andrew M. Watkins, Do Soon Kim, Bojan Tunguz, Walter Reade, Maggie Demkin, Jonathan Romano, Roger Wellington-Oguri, John J. Nicol, Jiayang Gao, Kazuki Onodera, Kazuki Fujikawa, Hanfei Mao, Gilles Vandewiele, Michele Tinti, Bram Steenwinckel, Takuya Ito, Taiga Noumi, Shujun He, Keiichiro Ishi, Youhan Lee, Fatih Öztürk, Anthony Chiu, Emin Öztürk, Karim Amer, Mohamed Fares, Eterna Participants, Rhiju Das

Messenger RNA-based medicines hold immense potential, as evidenced by their rapid deployment as COVID-19 vaccines. However, worldwide distribution of mRNA molecules has been limited by their thermostability, which is fundamentally limited by the intrinsic instability of RNA molecules to a chemical degradation reaction called in-line hydrolysis. Predicting the degradation of an RNA molecule is a key task in designing more stable RNA-based therapeutics. Here, we describe a crowdsourced machine learning competition ("Stanford OpenVaccine") on Kaggle, involving single-nucleotide resolution measurements on 6043 102-130-nucleotide diverse RNA constructs that were themselves solicited through crowdsourcing on the RNA design platform Eterna. The entire experiment was completed in less than 6 months, and 41% of nucleotide-level predictions from the winning model were within experimental error of the ground truth measurement. Furthermore, these models generalized to blindly predicting orthogonal degradation data on much longer mRNA molecules (504-1588 nucleotides) with improved accuracy compared to previously published models. Top teams integrated natural language processing architectures and data augmentation techniques with predictions from previous dynamic programming models for RNA secondary structure. These results indicate that such models are capable of representing in-line hydrolysis with excellent accuracy, supporting their use for designing stabilized messenger RNAs. The integration of two crowdsourcing platforms, one for data set creation and another for machine learning, may be fruitful for other urgent problems that demand scientific discovery on rapid timescales.

PaperPDFCodeCode Syntology ran

In Syntology Open this paper in Syntology's Atlas, the map of the papers in Syntology's graph and their citations.

For agents, Syntology's MCP tool lists every function and class Syntology harvested from this paper and whether it ran (how to connect): get_harvested_code_for_paper(arxiv_id="2110.07531")

Code

Syntology Ran 3 of 3 code samples harvested from 1 repository linked to this paper; 0 have no recorded run. Of those that ran: 2 ran · honoured contract; 1 ran · our draft was wrong.

By repository: official repository: 3 samples from 1 repository, 3 ran. The run record, sample by sample. “Ran” means executed on a synthesized input, not that the code is correct or reproduces the paper.

eternagame/KaggleOpenVaccine officialmentioned in papertf report

Repository list and official/mentioned flags are the archive's, frozen 2025-07-28. Reachability, where shown, is from one Syntology probe window (2026-09-16 to 2026-09-18); repositories not probed show nothing. GitHub stars are not tracked.

Code Syntology ran Syntology

3 samples harvested; 3 ran; 2 honoured the contract we drafted; 0 have no recorded run. Read from Syntology's graph 2026-09-24; that is when this build read the record, not when the samples ran.

2ran · honoured contract
1ran · our draft was wrong

Licence: 0 of the 3 samples are pointer only, meaning Syntology does not serve that copy's text. This page shows no code text for any sample; each one links to its file in the repository.

Harvested from eternagame/KaggleOpenVaccine. “Ran” means the sample executed on a synthesized input. It does not mean the output is correct, and nothing here reproduces the paper's results. “Honoured” and “violated” refer to a contract Syntology drafted from the code itself; “our draft was wrong” and “fixture could not drive it” are failures of Syntology's instrument, not of the code.

Each sample ends with its code_sha256, Syntology's identity for that exact code. An agent fetches the stored sample with Syntology's MCP tool get_code(code_sha256="…") (how to connect); click an identity to copy that call.

Repository labels, per sample. official repository: The archive marks this repository official for the paper. named in the paper: The archive records that the paper mentions this repository; it is not marked official. community (archive-listed): In the archive's code links for this paper, not marked official and not recorded as mentioned in the paper. found in paper text by Syntology: Syntology found this repository in the paper's own text; whether it is the authors' implementation is not asserted. community: Not in the archive's code links for this paper; a community repository Syntology harvested. Samples from a repository marked official are listed first. Licence labels name the repository's licence as recorded at harvest. “Pointer only” means Syntology does not serve that copy's text, for one of four reasons: no licence file was found; the licence was not identified; the licence is recorded as permissive but that copy's record is not marked cleared; or the licence is outside the permissive list Syntology serves text under (MIT, Apache-2.0, BSD and similar). Some licences outside that list permit redistribution, such as WTFPL, and GPL-3.0 under its conditions; they are simply not on the list. Hover a licence label for the reason. File links open the file on GitHub at the default branch, which may have changed since the harvest.

convert_structure_to_bps eternagame/KaggleOpenVaccine/scripts/nullrecurrent_inference.py official repository ran · honoured contract fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · c12446248bbe236d · report
secstruct_to_partner eternagame/KaggleOpenVaccine/scripts/nullrecurrent_inference.py official repository ran · honoured contract MIT (permissive) · 152931cf0eda1ea4 · report
write_bprna_string eternagame/KaggleOpenVaccine/scripts/nullrecurrent_inference.py official repository ran · our draft was wrong fingerprinted MIT (permissive) · 0bc7d10f116f2950 · report

Tasks

Data AugmentationDeep Learningscientific discovery

Results from the paper archive 2025-07-28

No leaderboard rows for this paper in the archive.

Report a problem or propose a change · a person checks every report against the paper or source before anything changes; decisions are listed on /corrections