The @openRxiv.bsky.social team wishes all of our authors, readers, Affiliates and community members a very happy holiday season and turn of the year! Please excuse any delays in processing your submissions while our staff also enjoy some well-deserved time off ☃️ #preprints #biorxiv #medrxiv

Don’t miss this opportunity! Please share with recent PhD grads or students who will soon graduate

@nytimes.com why not?

Impressive! Clever approach.

Congrats to the winners! I had an inside view of how the Arc team managed this competition since June. They were super-responsive to the competitors, handling questions and concerns in a transparent manner as they arose.while also doing their “day jobs”.

Nature Methods is hiring! We are looking for candidates with expertise in genetics, genomics and/or molecular biology to join our editorial team in the US (NYC/Jersey City) or China (Shanghai/Beijing). Apply by December 12! springernature.wd3.myworkdayjobs.com/SpringerNatu...

A true legend. www.bcm.edu/about-us/lea...

Work published today in @natbiotech.nature.com from Arc’s Luke Gilbert and Patrick Hsu labs presents a new way to insert large DNA sequences into the genome using engineered recombinases that don’t require DNA cutting or rely on the cell's repair machinery.

Coincidental juxtaposition of SNARE with the wrong kind of SNAP in my other feed:

Like the Monkey’s Paw—be careful what you wish for!

I've updated the BINSEQ manuscript to stay up to date with changes since I originally put it out at the beginning of the year Some notable changes: 1. Support for ambiguous bases with 4bit encoding 2. Support for sequence headers 3. Improved API www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Welcome to our 9th Core Investigator and first physician-scientist, John Pluvinage. His team investigates the hidden overlap between autoimmunity and neurodegeneration, developing targeted treatments for mysterious neurological cases and common dementias.

Arc Core Investigator @genophoria.bsky.social will speak on a free, online panel with @tkaraletsos.bsky.social, @emmalundberg.bsky.social, and @ronalfa.bsky.social on Wed., Oct. 29, as part of GENbio's “The State of AI in Drug Discovery in 2025.” Register at: webinars.liebertpub.com/e/the-state-...

Just tried this out on a couple of preprints, and this seems legit! Only minor issue so far is the Word file for the plan not opening. Also, it seems that AI x Bio is not a fully supported domain yet. But nice that it prominently acknowledged that!

Hear how Arc, Ultima Genomics, and @10xgenomics.bsky.social are partnering to generate perturbation data at the scale needed to train virtual cell models on The Bio Report podcast with guests @genophoria.bsky.social, Gilad Almogy, and Serge Saxonov: thebioreport.podbean.com/e/transformi...

Arc is looking for an outstanding early-career scientist to be our next Science Fellow. This program provides resources and freedom for those looking to transition into a principal investigator role immediately after doctoral training. Apply here: arcinstitute.org/programs/sea...

For decades, human genome editing has been limited to small, localized modifications. Today, in a new paper published in @science.org , researchers from Arc's Hsu lab show that bridge recombinase technology is capable of large-scale genomic rearrangements in human cells.

In another preprint from the @brianhie.bsky.social Lab and @synbiogaolab.bsky.social, they introduce Germinal, a generative AI system for de novo antibody design. Germinal produces functional nanobodies in just dozens of tests, making custom antibody design more accessible than ever before.

New work from Arc's @pauldatlinger.bsky.social of our Genome Engineering Technology Center. Congrats!

Many of the most complex and useful functions in biology emerge at the scale of whole genomes. Today, we share our preprint “Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models”, where we validate the first, functional AI-generated genomes 🧵

In a new preprint from @brianhie.bsky.social's lab, the team reports the first generative design of viable bacteriophage genomes. Leveraging Evo 1 & Evo 2, they generated whole genome sequences, resulting in 16 viable phages with distinct genomic architectures.

"It is a big loss for Nature Methods and its audience. I think your role there in the past decade has transformed and re-defined the imaging related landscape for the entire community." 😭 These notes make me sentimental, but they also show me that doing this job well matters. #editorgoals

Vaccines are safe and effective. RFK Jr. isn’t.

JOB ALERT 🚨 We are hiring TWO principal investigators in cell, molecular, systems, or chemical biology in Toronto, Canada at @sinaihealth.bsky.social. We provide a generous startup, fully funded salary and academic appointment at U of Toronto. www.nature.com/naturecareer... Please repost!

In this blog post from Arc scientists, learn about some of the decisions that went into the dataset and three-metric evaluation framework developed for the first Virtual Cell Challenge. arcinstitute.org/news/behind-...

I don’t know who needs this right now, but I really enjoy browsing “Paper Skygest”, a feed of posts on academic papers *from people you follow*. I think it’s what a lot of us are actually here for

I have an idea… journals.plos.org/plosbiology/...

To help competitors get started, our team created a Colab notebook that guides participants through training and running inference on an ML model. For this example we started with STATE, the recently released model from Arc: colab.research.google.com/drive/1QKOtY...

Over 2,000 people have registered for the Virtual Cell Challenge to create an AI model that can generalize for unseen perturbations. Hundreds of competitors have been submitting results from their models and the race, as you can see from the leaderboard, is heating up:

The Arc Institute Investigator Retreat is off to a great start! Huge thanks to Dave Burke and @brianhie.bsky.social for for sharing their computational research, and to Isha Jain, Will Allen, Faranak Fattahi, and Alex Pollen for diving into cell biology and neuroscience.

Our 2nd Investigator Retreat wrapped up with talks from Core Investigators Christoph Thaiss and Felix Horns, our incoming Science Fellow Maya Arce, and some of our Innovation Investigators and Ignite Awardees. We look forward to seeing how the connections made this week turn into new collaborations.

Academia may be a prestige economy but it wasn’t some choice of scientific leadership- we do it to ourselves, every day. Leadership rarely makes tenure criteria too down - it’s a committee of peers that sets it up for institutions. Leadership doesn’t sit on study sections - it’s peers doing it!

NIH Director say journals "bully scientists into paying large fees". No. Academia is a prestige economy in which scientific leadership chose to make journals the currency & Gold OA was deemed 'the way'. Publishers just cashed in; you don't have to pay $10K www.insidehighered.com/news/governm...

I think I made a difference! Anoxia was accepted in today’s @nytimes.com spelling bee!

Somewhat disappointing that bluesky has not been a major source of traffic to our Challenge. Seems like a struggle (at least for me) to get decent engagement here. LinkedIn is much better for me. X is still doing well for others

What an exciting week at @arcinstitute.org We started off with the release of State, our perturbation prediction (virtual cell) model, and today, we are kicking off the Virtual Cell Challenge

Introducing Arc Institute’s first virtual cell model: STATE

I’m sure the Trump Administration will be canceling all grants to the University of Florida because of their failure to combat anti-Semitism. Any day now. www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/u...

This was a tough one!

Why is the current admin okay with this at University of Florida? It seems far worse than anything Harvard did. Of course, we know it is just pretext… www.nytimes.com/2025/06/21/u...

Please RT ! 5️⃣ days left to register. Gordon Conference “Histone and DNA modifications” Tuscany 🇮🇹 20.-25. July 25 🗓️ Regulation of genome function by histone and nucleic acid modifications. Great speaker lineup !!! >25 talks will be chosen from abstracts. Submit yours ➡️ shorturl.at/hBjyT

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬 Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

Maybe some more oxygen to the brain is needed before they include this word…

So excited to have @epigenetichulk.bsky.social back!

Been going back and forth on whether it makes sense to post science in the midst of all that is happening. But here it goes with a couple of days of delay: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Given the variability in the process, it is even more amazing that affinity maturation works. Impressive work!

"Gold standard science"

Someone needs to tell NYT Spelling Bee about directed evolution. Maybe @carlzimmer.com ?

Riding past a preschool playground and hear a kid announce “I’m killing ants!” It seemed somewhat cute until I imagined 40 or so years ago a little Petey Hegseth telling all his friends about the ants he’s going to kill.