MicroFuse: Protein-to-Genome Expert Fusion for Microbial Operon Reasoning
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arXiv
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| Format: | Preprint |
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2026
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| author | Cho, Seungik |
| author_facet | Cho, Seungik |
| contents | Predicting microbial operon co-membership requires integrating two complementary biological signals: protein-scale molecular identity and genome-context organization. While recent biological foundation models provide powerful representations of each view independently, naive concatenation of these modalities ignores a key biological property -- protein identity and genomic context may agree when adjacent genes form a coherent functional module, or conflict when sequence similarity is misleading but genomic layout indicates independent regulation. We present MicroFuse, a protein-to-genome expert fusion framework that integrates structure-aware protein representations from ProstT5 with genome-context representations from Bacformer through a four-expert Mixture-of-Experts module (protein, genome-context, agreement, and conflict experts) with a learned soft router. Training combines binary cross-entropy with symmetric cross-modal InfoNCE alignment and disagreement-weighted supervised contrastive shaping. We further construct OG-Operon100K, a 100,000-pair scaffold-level benchmark from the OMG metagenomic corpus with biologically grounded positive and negative criteria. On OG-Operon100K, MicroFuse achieves the strongest AUROC, AUPRC, mAP, and mAR among ProstT5-only, Bacformer-only, and Concat MLP baselines. Ablations identify cross-modal contrastive alignment as the dominant component, and a hard sequence-conflict subset reveals MicroFuse's largest gains precisely in biologically ambiguous cases where protein identity alone is misleading. |
| format | Preprint |
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arxiv_https___arxiv_org_abs_2605_08815 |
| institution | arXiv |
| publishDate | 2026 |
| record_format | arxiv |
| spellingShingle | MicroFuse: Protein-to-Genome Expert Fusion for Microbial Operon Reasoning Cho, Seungik Machine Learning Biomolecules Genomics Quantitative Methods Predicting microbial operon co-membership requires integrating two complementary biological signals: protein-scale molecular identity and genome-context organization. While recent biological foundation models provide powerful representations of each view independently, naive concatenation of these modalities ignores a key biological property -- protein identity and genomic context may agree when adjacent genes form a coherent functional module, or conflict when sequence similarity is misleading but genomic layout indicates independent regulation. We present MicroFuse, a protein-to-genome expert fusion framework that integrates structure-aware protein representations from ProstT5 with genome-context representations from Bacformer through a four-expert Mixture-of-Experts module (protein, genome-context, agreement, and conflict experts) with a learned soft router. Training combines binary cross-entropy with symmetric cross-modal InfoNCE alignment and disagreement-weighted supervised contrastive shaping. We further construct OG-Operon100K, a 100,000-pair scaffold-level benchmark from the OMG metagenomic corpus with biologically grounded positive and negative criteria. On OG-Operon100K, MicroFuse achieves the strongest AUROC, AUPRC, mAP, and mAR among ProstT5-only, Bacformer-only, and Concat MLP baselines. Ablations identify cross-modal contrastive alignment as the dominant component, and a hard sequence-conflict subset reveals MicroFuse's largest gains precisely in biologically ambiguous cases where protein identity alone is misleading. |
| title | MicroFuse: Protein-to-Genome Expert Fusion for Microbial Operon Reasoning |
| topic | Machine Learning Biomolecules Genomics Quantitative Methods |
| url | https://arxiv.org/abs/2605.08815 |