Predictive design of tissue-specific mammalian enhancers that function in the mouse embryo

Abstract Enhancers control tissue-specific gene expression across animals 1 . Although deep learning 2,3 has enabled enhancer prediction and design in mammalian cell lines and non-mammalian model organisms 4–10 (reviewed in a previous publication 11 ), it remains unclear whether such approaches can operate within the regulatory complexity of mammalian genomes and tissues in vivo. Here we present a general strategy for designing tissue-specific enhancers that function reliably in mice. We use deep learning to train compact convolutional neural networks on curated chromatin accessibility data and fine-tune them by transfer learning on validated human and mouse enhancers. Guided by these models, we design 15 synthetic enhancers for the heart, limb and central nervous system in mouse embryos, all of which are active in their intended target tissue. These results demonstrate that mammalian enhancer function can be reliably inferred from DNA sequence alone, enabling the predictive de novo design of tissue-specific synthetic enhancers from modest training sets. This work establishes a generalizable framework for programmable control of mammalian gene expression in vivo, opening new avenues in functional genomics, synthetic biology and gene therapy.