Lighting the spark of aptamer data science

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Source: Science Magazine

Original: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126/science.aed6777?af=R...

Published: 2026-01-01T07:00:11Z

Aptamers are short synthetic nucleic acids that form a complex three-dimensional structure and bind to target molecules.They are used for molecular perturbations, disease detection and in synthetic biology.They are identified by SELEX, which enriches nucleic acid libraries with target-binding sequences, but it is challenging to select the most efficient aptamers.Luo et al. on page 51 developed SPARK-seq, a method combining aptamer binding, sequencing, and the study of gene inactivation on a single cell.1 SPARK-seq allows simultaneous mapping of thousands of aptamer-target interactions and identification of aptamers binding to low-abundance targets.[1] The platform combines CRISPR perturbation, single-cell transcriptomics, and aptamer profiling with SPARTA deep learning.This approach overcomes the limitations of classical screening and establishes "Aptomics" for decoding binding specificities.