The Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences

2027 Xiamen Symposium on Marine Environmental Sciences

January 12-15, 2027

GGBound: A Genome-Grounded Agent for Microbial Life-Boundary Prediction
ID:1491 Poster Presentation

2027-01-15 16:00 (China Standard Time)

Session:Session 29 - Marine Algae: Genetics, evolution and synthetic biology

Abstract
Characterizing the physiological life boundaries of microbial strains, including viable temperature, pH, salinity, substrate utilization, and morphology, is central to biotechnology and ecology, yet traditionally requires exhaustive in vitro screening. Existing computational approaches either treat physiological traits as isolated supervised targets or repurpose biological foundation models as static encoders, leaving the genotype-to-physiology gap largely unbridged. We formulate microbial life boundary prediction as a unified genome-to-physics task and address it with a genome-conditioned, tool-augmented LLM agent. To support this task, we curate a strain-centric benchmark from IJSEM, NCBI, and BacDive covering 1,525 strains and 6,448 instances across viability intervals, environmental optima, substrate utilization, categorical traits, and morphology. Architecturally, the agent injects frozen LucaOne genome embeddings into a Qwen backbone via lightweight token fusion, and reasons over a similarity-based RAG module and a Genome scale Metabolic Model GEM perturbation tool. We optimize the agent through a three stage pipeline of gene text alignment, agentic SFT on distilled trajectories, and GRPO with a novel counterfactual gene grounding reward that reinforces the policy only when the authentic genome embedding causally improves correct token generation relative to a zero gene ablation. The resulting 4B parameter agent matches or surpasses substantially larger frontier LLMs, with ablations confirming that genome token fusion, dynamic tool use, and the counterfactual reward each yield distinct, significant gains.
Speaker
HanBo Huang Shanghai Jiao Tong University

Author
HanBo Huang Shanghai Jiao Tong University

    Important Dates

    • Jan 30

      2026

      Session / Event proposals open

    • Mar 31

      2026

      Session / Event proposals close
      (Extended to April 7)

    • Apr 30

      2026

      Session acceptance notifications

    • Apr 30

      2026

      Abstract submissions & registration open

    • Jun 30

      2026

      Abstract submissions close
      (Extended to July 21)

    • Aug 31

      2026

      Abstract acceptance notifications

    • Sep 15

      2026

      Scientific program released

    • Oct 15

      2026

      Early bird registration closes

    • Jan 12–15

      2027

      XMAS 2027