Text2Trait: Advancing Gene–Trait Discovery through AI and Knowledge Graphs

Mikolaj Czaplejewicz, a master’s student from the Department of Advanced Computing Sciences at Maastricht University, recently joined my group as a Research Assistant on the Text2Trait project. Together, we developed an AI-driven text mining pipeline designed to extract trait associations with geomic features from scientific literature. Building upon the extracted relationships, Mikolaj constructed a knowledge graph and implemented an intuitive user interface to explore these associations. The Text2Trait platform holds significant promise not only for crop genomics and trait prediction, but also for broader applications in biomedical and life sciences.

This work is part of our broader vision to integrate natural language processing and knowledge graph technologies into multi-omics analysis pipelines. The project was jointly supervised by Prof. Wim Vriezen (Head, Plant Functional Genomics, BFFI, UM) and Dr. Aki Haarma (Department of Advanced Computing Sciences, UM), and represents a fruitful collaboration at the intersection of plant biology and AI.

Congratulations to Mikolaj for his outstanding dedication and technical contributions. We look forward to expanding the potential of Text2Trait through further development and interdisciplinary collaborations. Wishing you all the best in your future academic journey!