yeah, we assume this kind of tool would be used as one part of a second-stage follow-up screen when an order has been flagged and can’t be approved by default. I agree that ordering genes from a wide variety of organisms isn’t an anomalous or suspicious signal on its own. Right now, questions like “does this person have research history with this organism?”, which some of signals of legitimacy assembled to decide whether to fulfill a flagged order, are answered by ad-hoc googling by customer service reps; tools like Cliver can automated and accelerate that process (see their recent preprint on Evaluating AI-Assisted Customer Verification for Synthetic Nucleic Acid Screening).
yeah, we assume this kind of tool would be used as one part of a second-stage follow-up screen when an order has been flagged and can’t be approved by default. I agree that ordering genes from a wide variety of organisms isn’t an anomalous or suspicious signal on its own. Right now, questions like “does this person have research history with this organism?”, which some of signals of legitimacy assembled to decide whether to fulfill a flagged order, are answered by ad-hoc googling by customer service reps; tools like Cliver can automated and accelerate that process (see their recent preprint on Evaluating AI-Assisted Customer Verification for Synthetic Nucleic Acid Screening).