CRC-Screen: Certified DNA-Synthesis Hazard Screening Under Taxonomic Shift

The article presents CRC-Screen, a novel DNA-synthesis hazard screening approach that integrates three signals—$k$-mer Jaccard similarity, a five-LLM judge panel's trimmed-mean score, and cosine similarity to clustered embeddings—calibrated using Conformal Risk Control. This method achieved a 0% empirical test miss rate across ten folds on UniProt KW-0800 reviewed toxins, demonstrating the importance of calibration data over algorithmic complexity in certifiable DNA-synthesis screening. Practitioners can leverage this approach to enhance the reliability of hazard screening in DNA synthesis, particularly for sequences from underrepresented taxonomic families.