MAVE-NN: learning genotype-phenotype maps from multiplex assays of variant effect
Ammar Tareen, Mahdi Kooshkbaghi, Anna Posfai, William T. Ireland, David M. McCandlish, Justin B. Kinney
Abstract
Multiplex assays of variant effect (MAVEs) are a family of methods that includes deep mutational scanning experiments on proteins and massively parallel reporter assays on gene regulatory sequences. Despite their increasing popularity, a general strategy for inferring quantitative models of genotype-phenotype maps from MAVE data is lacking. Here we introduce MAVE-NN, a neural-network-based Python package that implements a broadly applicable information-theoretic framework for learning genotype-phenotype maps-including biophysically interpretable models-from MAVE datasets. We demonstrate MAVE-NN in multiple biological contexts, and highlight the ability of our approach to deconvolve mutational effects from otherwise confounding experimental nonlinearities and noise.