Jonathan Frazer

Blend to disentangle! New preprint led by our talented postdoc @eag91.bsky.social

10 days left to apply for an Assistant Professorship in Evolutionary Biology at Columbia.

Hello friends, the Harvard Life Science departments have banded together to hire a new colleague working at the intersection of Life Sciences and AI. Could be primarily an experimentalist, or could be primarily a compute/theorist. academicpositions.harvard.edu/postings/16773

AlphaFold Database is expanding into pandemic preparedness. Together with NVIDIA, DeepMind, EBI et al. we exhaustively predicted ~1.7 million homo- & heterodimers across 2,812 viral proteomes, resulting in 8,028 high-confidence predictions. 📄 research.nvidia.com/labs/dbr/ass... 🌐 alphafold.ebi.ac.uk

🧬 What do deep-learning models for proteins actually learn? Our new review looks at how model predictions relate to fitness, folding stability and function. With @cwjpugh.bsky.social, Mafalda Dias & @jonnyfrazer.bsky.social 🔗 chemrxiv.org/doi/full/10....

We are at a critical moment for the future of European science. As @eu-life.bsky.social founder, and together with 100s of institutes and universities across the continent, we call for an ambitious funding pot for FP10. See Luis Serrano's comments in El Mundo. www.mundoamerica.com/entertainmen...

We have a tenure-track faculty position in Evolutionary Biology in Columbia's E3B Department. Application deadline is October 15. Come be our colleague. Please RT! apply.interfolio.com/193016

Congratulations! Beautiful work. I know Mafalda and @m1quelag.bsky.social found it a pleasure to review.

Introducing the BRaVa results browser v1! 🎉 1.2M+ individuals across 10 global biobanks 44 heritable, disease-relevant traits (and counting) 419M gene- & variant-level association tests ➡️ nikbaya.github.io/brava_browser/

The 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge has begun! Submissions and the leaderboard are now open. This year's task: multi-context generalization and zero-shot prediction. Models will need to predict perturbation responses in cellular contexts with no training data. arcinstitute.org/news/virtual...

🦠 How did our cells originate? A study by @gabaldonlab.bsky.social at @irbbarcelona.org & @bsc-cns.bsky.social suggests cellular complexity emerged gradually over millions of years, rather than from a single evolutionary event. 📝 Published in @nature.com #BISTCommunity 👉 bist.eu/a-study-by-i...

@eag91.bsky.social was recently the 100th speaker of our Variant Effects Seminar Series. The work he presented has just been published as a preprint. Learn more: tinyurl.com/mrxf5zxv @solersanchisx.bsky.social, @cwjpugh.bsky.social, @federicobilleci.bsky.social, @jonnyfrazer.bsky.social

Conservation and divergence in the allosteric architectures of five human protein kinases. Excited to share our new preprint by @carlafolgado.bsky.social @tonibeltran.bsky.social @sangerinstitute.bsky.social @crg.eu @ibv-csic.bsky.social www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

🚨 Paid MSc research opportunity at CRG Barcelona! With Mafalda Dias and @jonnyfrazer.bsky.social, we’re hosting a 4-month MSc project: 🧬 “Folding versus function: disentangling the molecular mechanisms of missense variants in gene-trait associations” More info 👇 www.crg.eu/en/content/t...

Very excited about our new results, showing variational synthesis + large scale screens + co-designed training -> robust scaling laws for sequence-activity models.

1/ We’ve been working on making it easier to fine-tune AlphaGenome on new RNA-seq samples, with a focus on one of my favourite regulatory layers: splicing! Blog post: genomicsxai.github.io/blogs/2026-0...

Excited to share an update to D3 (DNA Discrete Diffusion) — an application of score-entropy discrete diffusion model for regulatory genomics! 🧬 Paper: biorxiv.org/content/10.110… (See thread below 👇) (1/n)

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)

@juruehle.bsky.social's PhD work is now out in Genome Biology 📚🧬 : Lentiviral single-cell MPRA of synthetic enhancers reveals motif affinity-based encoding of cell state specificity link.springer.com/article/10.1186/s13059-026-04186-9 Julia achieved three cool things with this work...🧵

Absolutely awesome work!

(1/10) The majority of human genetic variation is located in non-coding regions. The great challenge of the post-genomic era is to assign function to these variants. We reasoned that combining haplotyping with allele-specific multiomics can help pinpoint the functional ones: rdcu.be/fgr5W. A thread:

You can plant the name badges!!! #smbe2026

Mafalda Dias es finalista del premio Vanguardia de la Ciencia. Su línea de investigación está ayudando agilizar el diagnóstico de enfermedades raras, ofreciendo una evidencia adicional para médicos que ya tienen sospechas sobre ciertos genes implicados según los síntomas. ¡Vota ahora!

Mafalda has been shortlisted for the 2026 Premio Vanguardia de la Ciencia, one of the more visible science prizes in Spain. Her interview: www.lavanguardia.com/vanguardia-d... ...and we would be very grateful if you could vote here: www.lavanguardia.com/vanguardia-d...

How much does a language model forget when finetuned on new tasks? We show both model size and optimization matter and forgetting can be nearly eliminated with self-generated replay! arxiv.org/abs/2605.26097 w/Martin Marek, Dongkyu Cho, Shikai Qiu, Rumi Chunara, and Pavel Izmailov. 1/8

AI drug discovery has a data problem. We're fixing it. At ALLOX, we've spent the last few years building something that didn't exist before: a platform that systematically maps functional hotspots at scale, measuring the effects of mutations on protein-protein interactions across the proteome.

Join us for our next Kipoi Seminar with Noor Youssef, Harvard Medical School @harvardmed.bsky.social @deboramarks.bsky.social 👉 Predicting Viral Evolution to Accelerate Vaccine and Therapeutic Design 🧬 Wed May 6, 5:30pm CET 🍃http://kipoi.org/seminar 🦋 @kipoizoo.bsky.social

Very nice paper from Regeneron www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Meet evedesign: open-source AI, accessible protein design ✅Combine models for multiobjective optimization ✅Integrate experimental data ✅ Run on your own infrastructure 📄Paper: www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6... 💻Code: github.com/evedesignbio 🌐Webserver: evedesign.bio Collaborate: hello@evedesign.bio

New paper showing that much of the apparent success of protein language models in predicting mutational effects is a mirage: These models mostly memorize sites. 1/ www.biorxiv.org/content/10.6...

The main project of my PhD 🧬🔬 is out: we developed single-cell lentiMPRA, a lentivirus-based method to measure enhancer activity and transcriptomes at single-cell resolution. We then applied sc-lentiMPRA to fully synthetic enhancers 🧩... 🔗 doi.org/10.64898/202...

🚨 NEW @FraticelliLab PREPRINT JUST WENT LIVE biorxiv.org/content/10.6... Here, we describe PLSTCs, Soluplus-based expansion cultures of primary mouse *Acute Myeloid Leukemia* Stem Cells. And then we use LARRY barcoding to identify drivers of leukemogenicity and drug resistance!

Join us at Cell Symposia: Single-Cell Biology in the Era of AI (Dec 2–4, 2026, Munich) 🇩🇪 From multi-omics to AI-driven models of cellular dynamics — an exciting lineup across experimental & computational biology. Hope to see you there! 🔗 www.cell-symposia.com/single-cell-...

🚀 From modality-specific to compositional foundation models for cell biology Happy to share our new Perspective in Cell Systems. We describe an emerging shift toward compositional multimodal architectures 🧩 authors.elsevier.com/c/1mdzg8YyDf...

Early bird registration is closing Feb 28! We will have an AMAZING party!

Our grad-level "Deep Learning" course (MIT's 6.7960) is now freely available online through OpenCourseWare: ocw.mit.edu/courses/6-79... Lecture videos, psets, and readings are all provided. Had a lot of fun teaching this with @sarameghanbeery.bsky.social and @jeremybernste.in!

Post 3 of attempting to share more ML/Bio papers on Bluesky: Accelerating Scientific Research with Gemini: Case Studies and Common Techniques arxiv.org/abs/2602.03837

Training LLMs with verifiable rewards uses 1bit signal per generated response. This hides why the model failed. Today, we introduce a simple algorithm that enables the model to learn from any rich feedback! And then turns it into dense supervision. (1/n)

Post 2 of sharing interesting ML/bio papers that don’t seem to be getting much attention on Bluesky. Three papers on self-distillation, all from the same week! arxiv.org/abs/2601.18734 arxiv.org/abs/2601.19897 arxiv.org/abs/2601.20802

Why don’t neural networks learn all at once, but instead progress from simple to complex solutions? And what does “simple” even mean across different neural network architectures? Sharing our new paper @iclr_conf led by Yedi Zhang with Peter Latham arxiv.org/abs/2512.20607

Bluesky doesn’t really shine yet as a place to discover papers, especially at the intersection of biology and ML. To help a little, I’m going to start sharing papers I find interesting. To kick things off, here’s one from @petar-v.bsky.social and colleagues at DeepMind arxiv.org/abs/2601.22950

"Probing the Dark Energy in the Functional Protein Universe" is now published in @pnas.org 🎉 www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

For no reason, I remembered today that I too once got to take a picture holding Nobel Prize that I didn't earn

TF-MINDI is out! A new method to learn cis-regulatory codes through rich embeddings of TF binding sites. TF-MINDI decomposes motif neighbourhoods, and works downstream of any sequence-to-function deep learning model. We deeply study the enhancer code in human neural development, check out the thread

We’ve updated the EVEREST benchmark to include real-world viral evolution! www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1... Co-led by Noor Youssef and me, along with co-authors Navami Jain, Aarushi Mehrotra, Sarrah Leung, Abigail Jackson, @deboramarks.bsky.social, and with @cepi.net @futurehousesf.bsky.social!

🚨🚨🚨 We're looking for a research tech to work on alt splicing, pancreatic islets and diabetes. The goal is to set a high-throughput platform to investigate the role of alternative exons in beta cell biology! Interested in joining our lab at @melisupf.bsky.social? 👇 www.upf.edu/documents/d/...

Excited to share a preprint of my PhD project looking at interactions between SNPs and polygenic scores in the UK Biobank! A thread... 🧵 www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...