Focus on advanced AI in biology

Advanced artificial intelligence approaches are rapidly transforming how biological data are acquired and analyzed.

As scientists avidly use, tinker and build with artificial intelligence tools, best practices begin to emerge.

By exploiting recent advances in modern artificial intelligence and large-scale functional genomic datasets, sequence-to-function models learn the relationship between genomic DNA and its multilayer gene regulatory functions. These models are poised to uncover mechanistic relationships across layers of cellular biology, which will transform our understanding of cis gene regulation and open new avenues for discovering disease mechanisms.

Spatial omics technologies have transformed biomedical research by offering detailed, spatially resolved molecular profiles that elucidate tissue structure and function at unprecedented levels. AI can potentially unlock the full power of spatial omics, facilitating the integration of complex datasets and discovery of novel biomedical insights.

Methods for predicting bimolecular interactions are seeing tremendous growth, but challenges remain in capturing the full physical complexity of these interactions.

Artificial intelligence-enabled computational tools not only help us to elucidate biological processes but also facilitate the programming of biology through molecular and cellular engineering.

Mass spectrometry-based proteomics provides broad and quantitative detection of the proteome, but its results are mostly presented as protein lists. Artificial intelligence approaches will exploit prior knowledge from literature and harmonize fragmented datasets to enable mechanistic and functional interpretation of proteomics experiments.

Multimodal large language models have been recognized as a historical milestone in the field of artificial intelligence and have demonstrated revolutionary potentials not only in commercial applications, but also for many scientific fields. Here we give a brief overview of multimodal large language models through the lens of bioimage analysis and discuss how we could build these models as a community to facilitate biology research.

The success of deep learning in analyzing bioimages comes at the expense of biologically meaningful interpretations. We review the state of the art of explainable artificial intelligence (XAI) in bioimaging and discuss its potential in hypothesis generation and data-driven discovery.

New approaches in artificial intelligence (AI), such as foundation models and synthetic data, are having a substantial impact on many areas of applied computer science. Here we discuss the potential to apply these developments to the computational challenges associated with producing synapse-resolution maps of nervous systems, an area in which major ambitions are currently bottlenecked by AI performance.

Advancements in artificial intelligence (AI) have led to unprecedented success in modeling technically challenging domains including language, audio, image and video understanding. Here we discuss the opportunities represented by recent AI methods to advance immunology research.

Breakthroughs in AI and multimodal genomics are unlocking the ability to study the tumor microenvironment. We explore promising machine learning techniques to integrate and interpret high-dimensional data, examine cellular dynamics and unravel gene regulatory mechanisms, ultimately enhancing our understanding of tumor progression and resistance.

Risks from AI in basic biology research can be addressed with a dual mitigation strategy that comprises basic education in AI ethics and community governance measures that are tailored to the needs of individual research communities.

This primer introduces the elements and best practices of adapting and using language models for biology.

This Perspective presents a comprehensive and in-depth overview of computational models based on the deep learning architecture of transformers for single-cell omics analysis.

This Perspective discusses the issue of data leakage in machine learning based models and presents seven questions designed to identify and avoid the problems resulting from data leakage.

This Perspective discusses the methodologies, application and evaluation of interpretable machine learning (IML) approaches in computational biology, with particular focus on common pitfalls when using IML and how to avoid them.