Transformer model generated bacteriophage genomes are compositionally distinct from natural sequences

Novel applications of language models in genomics promise to have a large impact on the field. The megaDNA model is the first publicly available generative model for creating synthetic viral genomes. To evaluate megaDNA's ability to recapitulate the nonrandom genome composition of viruses and assess whether synthetic genomes can be algorithmically detected, compositional metrics for 4969 natural bacteriophage genomes and 1002