Saturday, September 12, 2026

Preprints

• Sat, Sep 12Foundation model

  DNA language model flags heat- and drought-resilient maize genes

  Researchers adapted AgroNT, a transformer-based genomic foundation model, by adding stress-conditioned prompt tokens to pinpoint regulatory regions tied to heat and drought resilience in maize.

  Debasmita Pal, Aaron Odell, Anuradha Singh, and 3 othersDebasmita Pal, Aaron Odell, Anuradha Singh, Addie Thompson, Arun Ross, Anne Thessen fewer authors

  Michigan State University; University of North Carolina

  bioRxiv
• Sat, Sep 12AI drug discovery

  Generative model designs small molecules using target interaction maps

  Computational chemists introduced ShEPhERD-2, a 3D generative model that builds drug candidates directly from physical interaction profiles specifying shape, electrostatics, and chemical binding features called pharmacophores.

  Kento A Abeywardane, Kenji Walker, Connor W Coley

  MIT

  bioRxiv
• Sat, Sep 12Multi-omicsSingle cell biology

  Machine learning shows lentiviral gene therapies avoid cancer-causing genes over time

  A deep neural network evaluated 274,959 clinical lentiviral integration sites across 10 patients treated for severe combined immunodeficiency (SCID-X1) to examine where vectors insert into human DNA.

  Hamidreza Saber, Zahra Mousavipour

  Islamic Azad University; Stanford

  bioRxiv