900-Orthrus: Evolutionary Functional RNA Foundation Models

Paper Talk · May 4, 2026 · 22m

The paper introduces Orthrus, a specialized RNA foundation model designed to predict the properties and functions of mature transcripts. Unlike traditional genomic models that rely on text-based learning, Orthrus utilizes a biologically inspired contrastive learning objective that leverages data from alternative splicing and evolutionary orthologs across hundreds of species. This approach allows the model to identify functional conservation and sequence importance with high efficiency, utilizing significantly fewer parameters than competing models. Orthrus achieves state-of-the-art results in…