The new method could revolutionize gene therapy and biotechnology by allowing precise activation or repression of genes in specific tissues.

In recent years, genetic editing technologies and other gene therapy approaches have given scientists the ability to alter the genes inside living cells.

"This project essentially asks the question: 'Can we learn to read and write the code of these regulatory elements?'" said Steven Reilly, PhD, assistant professor of genetics at Yale and one of the senior authors of the study. "If we think about it in terms of language, the grammar and syntax of these elements is poorly understood. And so, we tried to build machine learning methods that could learn a more complex code than we could do on our own."