Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) induce protein degradation by recruiting a target protein to an E3 ubiquitin ligase, making degradation a joint outcome of the degrader molecule and its biological context. Although public databases contain thousands of structured molecule-target-E3 records, degradation measurements are available for only a small fraction of them.
arXiv:2606. 04021v1 Announce Type: cross Abstract: Proteolysis-targeting chimeras (PROTACs) can selectively degrade disease-causing proteins, yet predicting which targets are amenable to degradation remains a critical bottleneck: existing computational methods require the complete PROTAC molecular structure, information unavailable before synthesis.
By Bryan Cheng, Austin Jin
arXiv:2606. 31126v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Predicting biomolecular properties from limited labeled data is a central bottleneck in protein engineering and small-molecule design.
By Davy Guan, Lu Zhang, Asiri Wijesinghe, Allen Zhu, He Zhao, Helen Power, F. Hafna Ahmed, Andrew Warden, Cheng Soon Ong, Daniel M. Steinberg
The study demonstrates that a simple, sequence-only approach using 330 interpretable descriptors and the TabPFN tabular foundation model can outperform complex multimodal deep learning methods for multi-label antimicrobial peptide activity prediction. On the ESCAPE benchmark (82,359 peptides, five labels), a label‑powerset TabPFN model achieved a mean average precision of 77.8%, surpassing the previous best of 72.1%. The approach also shows that predicted structure is unnecessary, that a small set of global physicochemical scalars can recover most performance, and that modeling label dependence benefits rare activities and informs assay prioritization.
By Raunak Kumar, Anuj Pal, Dhruvi Solanki, Parikshit Pareek, Juhi Singh, Jitin Singla
Antimicrobial peptides (AMPs) often act against multiple pathogen classes, making multi-label activity prediction a more realistic screening target than binary antimicrobial classification. The ESCAPE...
Monroe is a new molecular foundation model that improves upon existing models by pre‑training on over 81 million molecules from the PM6 quantum chemistry dataset, enhancing stereochemistry representation, and introducing novel training losses such as conformer denoising and embedding decorrelation. It also incorporates a prior‑data‑fitted model (TabPFN) for downstream in‑context prediction and demonstrates superior performance on Polaris benchmarks and activity cliff tests. Ablation studies show that the PFN‑based downstream approach can upgrade other models, producing state‑of‑the‑art variants MiniMol_PFN and CheMeleon_PFN.
By Blazej Banaszewski, Andrew W. Fitzgibbon
The paper introduces OmicsBench, a new reasoning benchmark for multi‑omics sequences that includes 1,160 expert‑validated questions across DNA regulation, RNA processing, and protein function tasks, requiring traceable evidence chains. Evaluation of 17 large language models shows that scientific LLMs, while more accurate in classification, often lack valid evidence, suggesting shortcut learning. To address this, the authors propose tool‑augmented on‑policy distillation (TA‑OPD), a post‑training method that improves both evidence grounding and predictive performance across five Qwen3.5 models of varying sizes.
By Jie Ying, Zhefan Wang, Zihong Chen, Zhengqing Li, Jinzhe Li, Gang Li, Jian Liu, Fang Hu, Tao Luo, Zhonghang Yuan, Wanli Ouyang, Stan Z. Li, Fan Yang, Nanqing Dong
The study evaluates whether biological reasoning models actually use their biological inputs by testing six models on DNA, protein, and single‑cell tasks. By perturbing one biological input while keeping others fixed, the authors find that many models (e.g., Evo2, ESM3, BioReason, BioReason‑Pro) rely primarily on textual information, with minimal impact from the biological representations. In contrast, models like ChatNT, Prot2Text‑V2, CellWhisperer, and Cell2Sentence‑Scale show greater dependence on their biological inputs, yet overall accuracy gains do not consistently reflect increased biological input contribution.
By Ada Fang, Nikitha Thoduguli, Lukas Fesser, Hanlin Zhang, Sham M. Kakade, Marinka Zitnik
arXiv:2609.39644v2 Announce Type: new
Abstract: Ribosome profiling (Ribo-seq) measures ribosome distributions along mRNAs, but observed occupancy profiles also contain experiment-specific distortions...
By Gabriele Martino, Denis Skibinski, Ivo L. Hofacker, Sebastian Tschiatschek
arXiv:2606. 16044v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Protein language models (pLMs) can generate novel protein sequences with properties beyond those observed in nature, yet the mechanisms underlying protein generation remain poorly understood.
By Darin Tsui, William Deinzer, Daniel Saeedi, Amirali Aghazadeh
arXiv:2606. 18703v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Pretrained biological language models expose per-token probability distributions through masked-token prediction, providing the likelihood interface central to sequence design, variant scoring, and mechanistic interpretation.
By Yanjun Shao, Yundi Chen, Yashvi Patel, Aurelien Pelissier, Mar\'ia Rodr\'iguez Mart\'inez
arXiv:2607. 17671v1 Announce Type: new Abstract: Large-scale single-cell perturbation atlases make it possible to ask an inverse question: given an observed transcriptional response, which annotated targets and compounds in a fixed library are most consistent with that response?
By Kseniia Vaniushkina, Jeongmin Lim, Jinyong Park