CRC-Screen: Certified DNA-Synthesis Hazard Screening Under Taxonomic Shift
Abstract
DNA-synthesis providers screen incoming orders by searching the requested sequence against curated hazard lists. We show that this baseline collapses to a 100% false-flag rate when the hazardous sequence comes from a taxonomic family absent from the reference set: under Conformal Risk Control's certified miss-rate constraint, a low-discrimination signal forces the threshold below the entire test-benign mass. We compose three signals derived from a synthesis order's public annotation: -mer Jaccard similarity to known toxins, the trimmed-mean score of a five-LLM judge panel, and cosine similarity to clustered embedding centroids. Fused under a monotone logistic aggregator and calibrated by Conformal Risk Control, the resulting screener certifies . Across ten leave-one-taxonomic-family-out folds at on UniProt KW-0800 reviewed toxins, the calibrated screener achieves 0% test miss rate on every fold and 0% test false-flag rate on nine of ten folds. The bound's finite-sample slack caps the certifiable miss rate at 1.77% on our 200-hazard subsample; reaching procurement-grade requires an larger calibration set, which the full reviewed UniProt KW-0800 corpus is large enough to deliver. The binding constraint on certifiable DNA-synthesis screening is calibration data, not algorithms. Code: https://github.com/najmulhasan-code/crc-screen
Keywords
Cite
@article{arxiv.2605.00074,
title = {CRC-Screen: Certified DNA-Synthesis Hazard Screening Under Taxonomic Shift},
author = {Najmul Hasan},
journal= {arXiv preprint arXiv:2605.00074},
year = {2026}
}
Comments
12 pages, 5 figures, 1 table. Code: https://github.com/najmulhasan-code/crc-screen