Computational biology

Aug 19, 2026

PhylaFlow: Hybrid flow matching in phylogenetic tree space

PhylaFlow is a hybrid flow-matching framework that navigates Billera–Holmes–Vogtmann (BHV) tree space to accelerate Bayesian phylogenetic inference. By learning geodesic paths from random trees to posterior samples, PhylaFlow efficiently initializes MCMC chains, drastically reducing the "burn-in" time. A PhylaFlow-MCMC variant, which guides MrBayes move acceptance, significantly outperforms traditional methods and even existing machine learning baselines for posterior sampling, achieving better results within the same computational budget. The work also explores conditioning on sequence embeddings, aiming for a future phylogenetics foundation model capable of zero-shot inference.

Aug 04, 2026

Chai Discovery's Bitter Lesson: Drug Design Is Another Scaling Problem

Chai Discovery is revolutionizing drug discovery by treating biology as an engineering problem, leveraging AI—particularly diffusion models and the "bitter lesson" of scaling—to design molecules rather than merely discover them. Their approach has boosted antibody design hit rates from 0.1% to 16%, aiming for a "Molecular CAD" suite that collapses discovery timelines from months to days. They partner with pharma, building infrastructure and creating a data flywheel to develop higher-quality, more targeted medicines for previously undruggable diseases.

Apr 16, 2026

Episode 16: Building AI for Life Sciences

OpenAI research lead Joy Jiao and product lead Yunyun Wang detail the development of specialized AI models for the life sciences. They discuss the new biochemistry-focused model series designed to accelerate research in genomics and protein understanding, the critical challenge of managing biosecurity risks through a "differentiated access" model, and the future vision of AI-powered autonomous labs that could revolutionize drug discovery and personalized medicine.

Apr 01, 2026

The Moonshot Podcast S2, Episode 2: Coding The Natural World

This episode of The Moonshot Podcast delves into the future of biological engineering, showcasing how AI and computational biology are transforming our interaction with living systems. Host Astro Teller first speaks with Brad Zamft of Heritable Agriculture about programming plants for increased yield, pest resistance, and drought resilience. Next, Relly Brandman from project A-Life explains how they're using AI to create a "virtual cell," shifting biomanufacturing from slow trial-and-error to a predictable engineering discipline for producing diverse materials like medicines, fuels, and textiles.

Jan 28, 2026

AlphaGenome author roundtable

A summary of the Google DeepMind team's discussion on AlphaGenome, their unified DNA sequence-to-function model. It covers the scientific motivation, the engineering breakthroughs in processing long DNA sequences at high resolution, the addition of complex biological modalities like splicing and contact maps, and the future direction of the research.

Nov 06, 2025

Mark Zuckerberg & Priscilla Chan: How AI Will Cure All Disease

Priscilla Chan and Mark Zuckerberg of the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative (CZI) discuss their strategy to accelerate scientific discovery through the Biohub, an operating philanthropy at the intersection of frontier AI and biology. They detail the development of foundational tools like the Cell Atlas, a 'periodic table for biology,' and their new focus on building virtual cell models to allow scientists to test high-risk hypotheses in silico, ultimately aiming to cure, prevent, and manage all diseases.