Reviews & Analysis

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  • Detection of molecular quantitative trait loci (QTL) facilitates mechanistic insights into disease-associated genetic variants. A new study describes BaseQTL, which exploits allele-specific expression to map molecular QTL from sequencing reads even without paired genotype data.

    • Eric R. Gamazon
    News & Views
  • A study based on effective dimension shows that a quantum neural network can have increased capability and trainability as compared to its classical counterpart.

    • Patrick J. Coles
    News & Views
  • A new format for read depth annotations in genomic data makes access to metadata more scalable and efficient.

    • Mikel Hernaez
    News & Views
  • Multi-omics studies have been increasingly used to better understand biological samples and infer molecular interactions. Nevertheless, a number of challenges must still be addressed to take full advantage of multi-omics data and to avoid reaching potentially incorrect conclusions.

    • Sonia Tarazona
    • Angeles Arzalluz-Luque
    • Ana Conesa
    Perspective
  • In this issue, a large and multiscale whole-body model of organ-specific regulation and metabolism for type 1 diabetes is developed, providing important details on glucose and insulin dynamics.

    • Jiao Zhao
    • Hao Xu
    • Laurence Yang
    News & Views
  • Development in digital-twin technology has been rapidly growing across a range of industries and disciplines. However, to ensure a wider and more robust adoption of such technology, various challenges must be addressed by the computational science community.

    • Steven A. Niederer
    • Michael S. Sacks
    • Karen Willcox
    Perspective
  • A uniform mathematical framework based on probabilistic graphical models drives the digital twin technologies towards dynamical control with real-time data.

    • Omer San
    News & Views
  • The field of biomolecular modeling has thrived by exploiting state-of-the-art technological advances. In this Perspective, the role of software and hardware advances, and the disparity and synergy between knowledge-based and physics-based methods are discussed and explored.

    • Tamar Schlick
    • Stephanie Portillo-Ledesma
    Perspective
  • Mapping X-ray diffraction patterns to crystal structures is a comprehensive and time-consuming task for chemists and materials scientists. In a recent work, researchers developed a machine-learning tool to make this job more ‘self-driving’.

    • Wenhao Sun
    • Michael F. Toney
    News & Views
  • In this issue, a protocol for querying criminal DNA databases is developed to prevent profile discovery, therefore reducing the potential for racial bias.

    • Denise Syndercombe Court
    News & Views
  • Analyzing cellular barcoding data is challenging due to the absence of a flexible, complete and easy-to-use set of tools that can help scientists derive biological meaning from these datasets. barcodetrackR is a promising package for filling this gap in the field.

    • Jennifer E. Adair
    • Mark R. Enstrom
    News & Views
  • A limitation of data obtained from RNA-seq experiments is the presence of different types of cell expression, making it difficult to identify the contribution of cell-type composition or cell-type-specific expression. A new study addresses this problem by proposing a method for cell-type-aware analysis of RNA-seq data.

    • Dvir Aran
    News & Views
  • The computational complexity of deep neural networks is a major obstacle of many application scenarios driven by low-power devices, including federated learning. A recent finding shows that random sketches can substantially reduce the model complexity without affecting prediction accuracy.

    • Shiqiang Wang
    News & Views
  • Sharing of genomic data poses a problem due to privacy concerns and lack of individual’s choice in the matter. In this issue, researchers propose a framework for sharing data where the control lies with the individual.

    • Fida K. Dankar
    News & Views
  • A model for the electrical double layer at solid-state electrochemical interfaces is reported, shedding some light on the design and optimization of future all-solid-state Li-ion batteries.

    • Sokseiha Muy
    • Nicola Marzari
    News & Views
  • The advent of STED microscopy, which allows observation at a sub-diffraction resolution, raises a challenge in studying spatial proximities of biomolecules’ distributions. In this issue, researchers have attempted to study colocalization of molecules by employing optimal transport.

    • Shulei Wang
    • Ming Yuan
    News & Views
  • Massive datasets have been made available to enable systematic studies of gene regulation and its control via epigenetic mechanisms. In this Review, state-of-the-art computational methods used to effectively extract knowledge from these datasets are presented and discussed.

    • Michael Scherer
    • Florian Schmidt
    • Markus List
    Review Article
  • The identification of genes that are associated with developmental trajectories of cells is an important focus in single-cell transcriptomics. This issue presents Scellnetor, a resource that facilitates this task.

    • Florian Klimm
    News & Views
  • Understanding and quantifying the uncertainty of predictions from COVID-19 pandemic models is essential to inform public health decision making. This issue presents one such examination using the influential CovidSim model.

    • Kathy Leung
    • Joseph T. Wu
    News & Views
  • Obtaining a consistent taxonomy of neuron types is challenging mainly because of the high dimensionality of the datasets. Coupled autoencoders are a step forward in achieving this goal.

    • Stephane Bugeon
    News & Views