# Nucleotide Transformer: building and evaluating robust foundation models for human genomics

*PRI Rank #4 · Topics and Trends in Most Cited Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies Papers, Class of 2026*

*Canonical URL: https://pri.pepkio.com/top-papers/genomics-and-phylogenetic-studies/2026/rank-4*

| Field | Value |
| --- | --- |
| Rank | #4 |
| 18m citations | 347 |
| Journal | Nature Methods |
| Year | 2024 |
| DOI | 10.1038/s41592-024-02523-z |
| Corresponding authors | M. Lopez, Thomas Pierrot |
| Institution | InstaDeep, United Kingdom |

**Ranking page:** [Topics and Trends in Most Cited Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies Papers, Class of 2026](https://pri.pepkio.com/top-papers/genomics-and-phylogenetic-studies/2026)

**Paper link:** [10.1038/s41592-024-02523-z](https://doi.org/10.1038/s41592-024-02523-z)

## Topics

Nucleotide Transformer · foundation models · Biological sequence prediction · molecular phenotype prediction · Transformer models · context-specific nucleotide representations · 3,202 human genomes · 850 diverse species genomes · fine-tuning · low-data settings · transfer learning · genetic variant prioritization · attention mechanisms · genomic elements · 2.5 billion parameters · pre-training on DNA sequences · multi-species genomics · Zero-shot learning

## Cite this ranking

```
Pepkio Research Index (PRI). Topics and Trends in Most Cited Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies Papers, Class of 2026. https://pri.pepkio.com/top-papers/genomics-and-phylogenetic-studies/2026. Accessed 2026-07-17.

Zheng Su, Tinsley Li, Thematic Shifts in Early-High-Impact Cancer Genomics and Diagnostics Research: A Bibliometric and Semantic Analysis. bioRxiv 2026.07.04.736459; doi: https://doi.org/10.64898/2026.07.04.736459
```