Omics/sequencing

The UK Biobank, with genetic data on half a million individuals, set a benchmark for scale in medical research. It contains whole genome sequencing data for all 500,000 participants, making it the world’s largest genetic project to date. A recent collaboration between the San Diego–headquartered clinico-genomics company Helix and the Salt Lake City–based biotech Recursion…

The potential of Artificial Intelligence (AI) to accelerate medical discovery is immense, particularly within the dynamic and mutable area of biology. Unlike the more predictable fields of chemistry and physics, biology presents unique challenges due to its complexity and constant adaptation, areas where AI can play a transformative role but has been limited to date…

Isomorphic Labs and Google DeepMind have unveiled AlphaFold 3, a powerful AI system that draws on a novel diffusion-based architecture to accurately model the structures of complexes containing proteins, nucleic acids, DNA and RNA strands, small molecules, ions and modified residues. Diffusion models are a type of generative model that has won significant popularity in…

Over the past few decades, structural biology has undergone a quiet renaissance, thanks in large part to technological advances in cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) and computational techniques. Cryo-EM has emerged as a powerful tool for determining the high-resolution structures of proteins and protein complexes, complementing traditional methods like X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR)…

Endometriosis, a condition where endometrial tissue grows outside the uterus, has a strong genetic underpinning. A new study published in the Journal of Molecular Diagnostics sheds light on this connection. Researchers from a team including Genzeva, LumaGene, RYLTI Biopharma, Brigham & Women’s Hospital of Harvard University and QIAGEN Digital Insights used a unique approach in…

The University of Pittsburgh’s recent, significant expansion of its high-performance computing capabilities, courtesy of a gift from Dell Technologies, indicates a strategic commitment to using large-scale data analysis for faster translational research. The additional 9.672 gigaFLOPS of computational power – translating to nearly 9.7 trillion additional computations per second – could help Pitt’s Innovation Hub…

A collaboration between the Novo Nordisk Foundation, the Export and Investment Fund of Denmark (EIFO), and NVIDIA will establish a national AI Innovation Centre in Denmark focused on accelerating research and innovation in fields including healthcare, life science, and quantum computing. The initiative is led on the Danish side by the Novo Nordisk Foundation, which…

A central hurdle in computational protein design is the mismatch between proteins designed in silico and their actual behavior after synthesis. “You can design millions of proteins on a computer over the course of a week or a month, but computational approaches are just not good enough,” explained David Younger, co-founder and CEO of A-Alpha…

Large language models (LLMs) such as ChatGPT promise advances that extend beyond capturing public interest. Because transformer models like GPT have an architecture that supports the understanding of language in context, they point to an array of novel possibilities for scientific research. “The transformer architecture is critical,” according to Michael Connell, the chief operating officer…

Following the recent expansion of Amazon Omics, as covered in our previous article “Ready, set, analyze: Amazon Omics unveils new Ready2Run workflows”, we wanted to explore the role of third-party providers in shaping the landscape of genomic analysis and bioinformatics. NVIDIA is one of these providers. The GPU company has worked to integrate their Parabricks…

Brooklyn-based lab automation company Opentrons has debuted its new Flex robot, with the aim of broadening access to advanced lab automation for life scientists. In a recent email interview, Opentrons CEO, Jonathan Brennan-Badal, highlighted that the Opentrons Flex robot is designed to offer a technically sophisticated, yet economically accessible automation platform for life scientists. The…

Amazon Web Services (AWS) recently announced a significant expansion of Amazon Omics at the annual AWS Life Sciences Executive Symposium in Boston. Amazon Omics, which the company introduced last year, helps life science organizations to store, query and analyze genomic, transcriptomic and other omics data. While other tools such as Qlucore Omics Explorer, Genospace, StrandOmics,…

Machine learning algorithms, such as Alphabet’s neural network-based model AlphaFold2, are steadily transforming medical research, shedding light on complex biological structures. A recent case in point involves research using the technology to explore the Commander complex, a 16-protein complex crucial for cellular protein transport processes. This complex is not only vital for normal cellular function,…

Continued innovations in bioinformatics paired with the falling cost of DNA sequencing are poised to spur research breakthroughs in 2023. To gauge how the DNA sequencing field is likely to evolve, we reached out to Logan Zinser, SVP, finance, Element Biosciences and Keith Robison, principal engineer, NGS Computational Biology, Ginkgo Bioworks. In the following feature, the two muse on themes…