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Volume 21 Issue 8, August 2024

Focus on advanced AI in biology

Advanced artificial intelligence (AI)-based methods are having a transformative impact on biological research, as explored in this special issue.

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Image: Weiquan Lin / Getty Images. Cover design: Thomas Phillips

Editorial

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This Month

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Correspondence

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Comment

  • 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.

    • Alexander Sasse
    • Maria Chikina
    • Sara Mostafavi
    Comment
  • 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.

    • Kyle Coleman
    • Amelia Schroeder
    • Mingyao Li
    Comment
  • 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.

    • Benjamin M. Gyori
    • Olga Vitek
    Comment
  • 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.

    • Shanghang Zhang
    • Gaole Dai
    • Jianxu Chen
    Comment
  • 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.

    • Michał Januszewski
    • Viren Jain
    Comment
  • 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.

    • Eloise Berson
    • Philip Chung
    • Nima Aghaeepour
    Comment
  • 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.

    • Joy Linyue Fan
    • Achille Nazaret
    • Elham Azizi
    Comment
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Research Highlights

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Technology Feature

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News & Views

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Research Briefings

  • Rapid advancements in transcriptomics have enabled the quantification of individual transcripts for thousands of genes in millions of single cells. By coupling a machine learning inference framework with biophysical models describing the RNA life cycle, we can explore the dynamics driving RNA production, processing and degradation across cell types.

    Research Briefing
  • We developed PINNACLE, a graph-based AI model for learning protein representations across cell-type contexts. These contextualized protein representations enable the integration of 3D protein structure with single-cell genomic-based representations to enhance protein–protein interaction prediction, analysis of drug effects across cell-type contexts, and prediction of therapeutic targets in a cell type-specific manner.

    Research Briefing
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Perspectives

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Brief Communications

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