The Rohs lab recently published a new PNAS paper led by Dr. Tsu-Pei Chiu. In this study, they propose a new DNA encoding scheme based on the physicochemical groups of the base pairs in the DNA major and minor grooves, rather than the DNA sequence. This allows for description of chemical modifications, mismatched base pairs, or synthetic base pairs. The preferences of DNA binding proteins for chemical groups are learned using a deep learning method. Read more in PNAS here.