Developing a Standard Definition for Sequences of Concern: Test Set Collection

A collection of 1.1 million nucleic acid sequences from pathogens, toxins, and related organisms used to develop a biosecurity screening rubric. The dataset was created by Tessa Alexanian and published on figshare under a CC-BY-4.0 license, last updated on June 4, 2026. It includes sequences from the Australia Group Common Control Lists and model organisms to define and recognize potential sequences of concern.

Use Cases

• Benchmarking biosecurity screening systems based on the 1.1 million sequence test set.
• Training machine learning models to flag sequences of concern based on the defined rubric for human pandemic-potential viruses.
• Developing policy standards for nucleic acid synthesis providers based on the concrete sequence of concern definition.
• Refining categorization of low-risk gene classes based on the stakeholder-reviewed rubric.

Strengths

• Contains 1.1 million sequences from pathogens, toxins, and related organisms.
• The applied rubric reduced disputed categorizations by 44.3% for controlled viruses.
• Initial analysis showed over 80% agreement between four existing biosecurity screening systems.

Limitations

• Column-level documentation is absent; field semantics must be inferred after download.
• Row count is unknown, which may limit suitability assessment.
• The dataset is very small at 15.2 KB, indicating limited scope or highly summarized data.

Provenance

Source

figshare

Collection Method

Sequences were organized from pathogens and toxins on the Australia Group Common Control Lists and their non-controlled relatives, along with model organisms and synthetic constructs.

Freshness

Last updated 2026-06-04 05:33:02; freshness should be verified.