TechBio Today, today’s edition

• Thu, Oct 15Foundation modelProtein design

  Upgraded diffusion model scaffolds intricate enzyme active sites from scratch

  University of Washington researchers have introduced RFdiffusion3, a generative model that uses free-atom diffusion to build custom protein and RNA structures around precise geometric constraints.

  Jasper Butcher, Rohith Krishna, Raktim Mitra, and 30 othersJasper Butcher, Rohith Krishna, Raktim Mitra, Seth M. Woodbury, Donghyo Kim, Rafael I. Brent, Yanjing Li, Nathaniel Corley, Andrew Favor, Anqi Chen, Paul T. Kim, Jonathan Funk, Gabriela Bastidas Reinoso, Kejia Wu, Aiko Muraishi, Helen E. Eisenach, Saman Salike, Simon Mathis, Tuscan Rock Thompson, Antonia Ruder, Enisha Sehgal, Andrew Kubaney, Jie Chen, Yuliya Politanska, Brian Coventry, Odin Zhang, Florence J. Hardy, Bo Qiang, Kieran Didi, Maxwell Kazman, Lars L. Schaaf, Frank DiMaio, David Baker fewer authors

  University of Washington; The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability; Technical University of Denmark; and 5 othersUniversity of Washington; The Novo Nordisk Foundation Center for Biosustainability; Technical University of Denmark; Cambridge; ETH Zurich; Oxford; Howard Hughes Medical Institute; NVIDIA fewer institutions

  Science
• Thu, Oct 15AI drug discovery

  Language models pull standardized rare-disease symptoms directly from patient notes

  Researchers built RARE-PHENIX, an automated framework that reads unstructured clinical text, standardizes symptoms into formal Human Phenotype Ontology terms, and ranks them by diagnostic importance.

  Cathy Shyr, Yan Hu, Rory J. Tinker, and 9 othersCathy Shyr, Yan Hu, Rory J. Tinker, Thomas A. Cassini, Kevin W. Byram, Rizwan Hamid, Daniel V. Fabbri, Adam Wright, Josh F. Peterson, Undiagnosed Diseases Network, Lisa Bastarache, Hua Xu fewer authors

  Vanderbilt; University of Texas; Mount Sinai; Yale

  npj Digital Medicine
• Thu, Oct 15Multi-omicsSingle cell biology

  Unified variant caller improves structural mutation detection across short- and long-read data

  HitSV combines repeat-aware breakpoint detection with haplotype-resolved local DNA assembly to identify structural genomic variants across multiple sequencing platforms.

  Gaoyang Li, Yadong Liu, Anqi Zhang, and 5 othersGaoyang Li, Yadong Liu, Anqi Zhang, Xiaoyi Lin, Zheng Hu, Bo Liu, Long Qian, Yadong Wang fewer authors

  Nature Biotechnology
• Wed, Oct 14Clinical AIMulti-omics

  AI scans link brown fat activity to lower psychiatric disease rates and flag candidate drugs

  An artificial intelligence system quantified human brown adipose tissue activity across clinical scans, revealing strong associations between active brown fat, improved metabolic profiles, and reduced rates of psychiatric illness.

  Nicolás Gómez-Banoy, Jorge A. Barrero, Luiza Rachel Pinheiro de Carvalho, and 15 othersNicolás Gómez-Banoy, Jorge A. Barrero, Luiza Rachel Pinheiro de Carvalho, Caroline S. Jiang, Tara Doma Lama, Nakul Karandikar, Mascha Koenen, Tiffany Lam, Kaja Plucińska, Ksenia Morozova, Stephanie Chahwan, Gustavo Barraza, Burcin Agridag Ucpinar, Jennifer E. Liu, Rohit Sharma, Daniel Lafontaine, Heiko Schöder, Paul Cohen fewer authors

  Rockefeller; Memorial Sloan Kettering; Cornell; and 3 othersRockefeller; Memorial Sloan Kettering; Cornell; Laboratorio de Lípidos y Diabetes; Heidelberg; Helmholtz fewer institutions

  Nature
• Wed, Oct 14Multi-omicsSingle cell biology

  Graph-based method parses tissue architecture across spatial scales

  SpatialZoomer uses spectral graph theory to analyze spatial transcriptomics data simultaneously at individual cell resolution and across broad tissue domains.

  Xinqi Li, Yuhan Fan, Yue Han, and 10 othersXinqi Li, Yuhan Fan, Yue Han, Wenbo Guo, Jingmin Huang, Nan Yan, Zeyu Chen, Yanhong Wu, Yuxin Miao, Lin Hou, Xuegong Zhang, Zeyu Chen, Jin Gu fewer authors

  Tsinghua; China Agricultural University; Peking

  Nature Biomedical Engineering

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