The @steinaerts.bsky.social lab published CREsted, an end-to-end modeling framework to 🧬 Train sequence-based enhancer models on large sc datasets 🔍 Decode enhancer logic with nucleotide-level interpretability ⚙️ Design synthetic enhancers with cell-type specificity https://tinyurl.com/ypurmrw5

The registration deadline for the Flanders Nanopore Day with @nanoporetech.com is quickly approaching, and the program suggests it will be an amazing event! All information is available at nanoporeflanders.be

Modeling cis-regulatory variation in human brain enhancers across a large Parkinson's Disease cohort https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.03.15.711881v1

Last week to submit an abstract to Flanders Nanopore Day conference!

🧬 We're hiring a postdoc! Come chart somatic evolution with us using cutting-edge long-read & single-cell tech 🔬 Computational bio background + love for complex cancer genomics = perfect fit 📍 Leuven, Belgium 📧 jobs.vib.be/j/129915/ #postdoc #genomics #hiring

Paper alert! 💻 How many cells do you need to train reliable deep learning models in regulatory genomics? We asked how data quality, sequencing depth, and dataset size affect training of sequence-to-function models from scATAC-seq. Out now www.nature.com/articles/s41... (details below)

🚀 Proudly introducing the VIB-KU Leuven Center For Neuroscience, a merger of the two former VIB research centers VIB-KU Leuven Center for Brain & Disease Research and Neuro-Electronics Research Flanders (NERF)! Our new motto: Bold Science, Real Impact. www.youtube.com/watch?v=uhaq...

We are thrilled to share our new pre-print: “System-wide extraction of cis-regulatory rules from sequence-to-function models in human neural development”. S2F-deeplearning models can accurately encode enhancers, yet decoding these models into human-interpretable rules remains a major challenge.

Join us at the Flanders Nanopore Day conference on April 17th in Antwerp, organized together with @nanoporetech.com! Details are available at nanoporeflanders.be, including registration (free), abstract submission, and project prizes with free PromethION sequencing for two selected projects.

We are looking for a new colleague in the lab of @jdemeul.bsky.social! If you are looking for a Postdoctoral position in Cancer Genomics,check the position here: jobso.id/pbgr

🧬 How do cancer cells evolve, and become drug resistant during therapy? Researchers at VIB–KU Leuven developed SPLONGGET, a new single-cell method combining long-read sequencing with multi-omics to reveal tumor evolution and CAR-T therapy resistance. 🔗 www.vscentrum.be/post/new-met...

We have two open positions for a ML and a LLM engineer to launch a machine learning expertise unit in our center @vibai.bsky.social, see vib.ai/en/opportuni...

1/ First preprint from @jdemeul.bsky.social lab 🥳! We present our new multi-modal single-cell long-read method SPLONGGET (Single-cell Profiling of LONG-read Genome, Epigenome, and Transcriptome)! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We will have our next community meeting on Tuesday, 2025-09-16 at 18:00 CEST! Niklas Kempynck will be presenting on CREsted, a package for training enhancer models on scATAC-seq data. (Zoom registration link and more information in thread!) 🧵

1/ First preprint from @jdemeul.bsky.social lab 🥳! We present our new multi-modal single-cell long-read method SPLONGGET (Single-cell Profiling of LONG-read Genome, Epigenome, and Transcriptome)! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

FlyBase needs your help! We ask that European labs continue to contribute to Cambridge, UK FlyBase, whereas US and other non-European labs can contribute to US FlyBase. For more information and how to donate: wiki.flybase.org/wiki/FlyBase...

"This could be the difference whether your child gets cancer. Are you willing for them to die because the therapy for them is delayed?" Powerful video with voices from top US scientists on the very real and devastating impacts of the funding cuts.

We currently have a call for support that has gone out to European labs, to support FlyBase-UK. We are asking our colleagues from labs in the US and other countries to wait for a similar call to them that will go out in the near future, to support the US sites. We thank you for your patience.

🤸‍♂️ We once again teamed up with TAJO vzw — an organization combatting early school leaving, and allowing youth from vulnerable home situations to enter society autonomously and prepared — to inspire young people to get interested in neuroscience! Find out more 👉 cbd.sites.vib.be/en/news#/new...

Our spotlight winner, Ruben Cools, presented his full talk exploring how they are bridging genotype and phenotype through long Oxford Nanopore read, single-molecule multiomics. #NanoporeConf

VIB.AI's International PhD call is now open! https://tinyurl.com/53nc9vnd If you're interested in applying AI to biology, take a look at the PhD projects across our labs. 🗓️ Deadline: June 22nd

Our new preprint is out! We optimized our open-source platform, HyDrop (v2), for scATAC sequencing and generated new atlases for the mouse cortex and Drosophila embryo with 607k cells. Now, we can train sequence-to-function models on data generated with HyDrop v2! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We released our preprint on the CREsted package. CREsted allows for complete modeling of cell type-specific enhancer codes from scATAC-seq data. We demonstrate CREsted’s robust functionality in various species and tissues, and in vivo validate our findings: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

We wrote a review article on modelling and design of transcriptional enhancers using sequence-to-function models. From conventional machine learning methods to CNNs and using models as oracles/generative AI for synthetic enhancer design! @natrevbioeng.bsky.social www.nature.com/articles/s44...

Just very happy to have our paper out today! A big thanks to all our co-authors, and to Nikolai and @steinaerts.bsky.social for the teamwork over the past years. If you are interested in using our models for cross-species enhancer studies, check out crested.readthedocs.io/en/stable/mo... 🙂

In a new study, Nikolai Hecker, Niklas Kempynck et al. in the team of @steinaerts.bsky.social explore 300 million years of brain evolution through the lens of enhancer codes. www.science.org/doi/10.1126/...

An open letter to the President of the @royalsociety.org – time to stand up for your values. occamstypewriter.org/scurry/2025/...

Looking forward to the Inaugural Symposium of the Center for AI & Computational Biology vib.ai with a great line-up of speakers at the interface of AI & biology: D. Kelley, J. Gagneur, Z. Avsec, T. Kortemme, B. Lehner, F. Fraternali, A. Tanay & O. Stegle (20Nov) www.vibconferences.be/events/vibai...