Gene Embedding Hub: a standardized resource for human gene representations
Gene embeddings are vector representations of gene identity that provide machine-learning models with information from diverse biological sources. However, their use is hindered by a lack of standardization: inconsistent identifiers, formats, and preprocessing conventions. In this work, we present a unified resource of 67 human gene-embedding sets derived from protein, DNA and RNA sequences, biomedical text, bulk expression data, single-cell expression models, functional data, biological networks, knowledge graphs, regulatory genomics and multimodal models, covering up to 20,097 GENCODE-annotated protein-coding genes. The collection includes both published precomputed embeddings and representations generated or extracted from publicly available models and biological data. Each embedding set is organized in a folder containing the embedding matrix, the Ensembl gene identifiers, machine-readable metadata, and processing documentation. We validate the resource by measuring global and local similarity, cross-embedding consensus, and cross-embedding predictability. The collection is designed to allow community-contributed embeddings that meet predefined technical and documentation requirements, enables comparison of gene representations across modalities and provides standardized embeddings for training and downstream applications.
Authors
- Valentina Boeva (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0002-4382-7185)
- Michael Bohl (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0007-4084-6560)
- Daniel Tabares (ORCID: https://orcid.org/0009-0000-2436-3402)
Institutions
- ETH Zurich (CH)
Publication Details
- Journal
- bioRxiv (Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory)
- Published
- 2026-11-01
- DOI
- https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.10.29.762818
- Primary Topic
- Bioinformatics and Genomic Networks
- Type
- preprint
Funders
- Schweizerischer Nationalfonds zur Förderung der Wissenschaftlichen Forschung