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jobs, grants, hackathons, events, tools, and articles for the computational biology community.
Last updated: Jul 6, 2026
- toolGitHub (Genentech, in collaboration with Stanford)Jul 4, 2026SpatialAgent: An Autonomous AI Agent for Spatial Biology
SpatialAgent is an autonomous LLM-driven agent that spans the full spatial biology research workflow — experimental design, multimodal spatial transcriptomics/scRNA-seq analysis, and hypothesis generation — using 72 specialized tools and 17 guided skill templates. It runs in autonomous or co-pilot mode and matched or outperformed human scientists on benchmark tasks across ~2 million cells from brain, heart, and colitis-model tissue.
- toolGitHub (mims-harvard, ICML 2026)Jul 2, 2026SPATIA: Multimodal Generation and Prediction of Spatial Cell Phenotypes
SPATIA is a multimodal deep learning framework from the Harvard MIMS lab that jointly models cell imagery and gene expression to predict and generate spatial cell phenotypes. It uses cross-attention to fuse morphology with transcriptomics and transformer modules to aggregate niche- and tissue-level context, and can generate cell morphology images conditioned on predicted state transitions via flow matching.
- toolGitHubJul 2, 2026OpenProteo: vendor-neutral Rust/Python readers for MS proteomics raw data
OpenProteo is an open-source Rust library (with Python bindings and a CLI) that reads proprietary mass-spectrometry raw formats from Thermo, Bruker, and Waters instruments and converts them into standard mzML, without requiring vendor SDKs or Windows-only DLLs. It's an umbrella project pairing with sibling crates OpenTimsTDF (Bruker timsTOF) and OpenWRaw (Waters MassLynx).
- toolBioconductorJun 27, 2026FLAMES (FLAMESv2)
FLAMES v2.6.0 (Bioconductor 3.23) is a modular, protocol-agnostic R/Bioconductor package for full-length isoform analysis from long-read single-cell and spatial RNA-seq data. It supports droplet-based and combinatorial barcoding single-cell methods as well as spatial transcriptomics workflows, and scales to multi-sample cohort analyses. Key outputs include isoform detection, alternative splicing quantification, and differential splicing analysis integrated with Bioconductor's genomic infrastructure.
- toolBioconductorJun 25, 2026fRagmentomics (Bioconductor 3.23)
fRagmentomics characterizes cell-free DNA fragments overlapping somatic mutations from BAM files, supporting multiple data formats and mutation representation conventions. It is designed for liquid biopsy and cancer genomics applications. New in Bioconductor 3.23.
- toolBioconductorJun 25, 2026MetaboAnnotatoR (Bioconductor 3.23)
MetaboAnnotatoR performs feature annotation on LC-MS all-ion fragmentation (AIF) datasets using fragment ion libraries, enabling automated metabolite identification in untargeted metabolomics workflows. New in Bioconductor 3.23.
- toolbio.tools / RosettaCommonsJun 20, 2026RFantibody
RFantibody (Nature 2025) is an integrated pipeline for structure-based de novo antibody and nanobody design, combining RFdiffusion (backbone generation), ProteinMPNN (CDR sequence design), and fine-tuned RoseTTAFold2 (structure validation). Cryo-EM confirms atomic accuracy of designed VHHs targeting influenza haemagglutinin and C. difficile toxin B. Free for academic and commercial use.
- toolGitHub / refresh-bio | Nature BiotechnologyJun 20, 2026sc-SPLASH — Reference-Free Discovery for Single-Cell and Spatial Transcriptomics
sc-SPLASH extends the SPLASH statistical framework to barcoded scRNA-seq (10x Chromium) and spatial transcriptomics (10x Visium), enabling reference-free, statistics-first discovery of transcriptomic variation without a reference genome. Its standalone BKC preprocessing submodule is ~50× faster than UMI-tools, and the pipeline has demonstrated discovery of novel secreted proteins in non-model organisms, tumor-associated mutations, and spatially-regulated alternative splicing. Published in Nature Biotechnology (April 2026).
- toolBioconductorJun 13, 2026Cardinal
Cardinal is a mass spectrometry imaging toolbox for R providing efficient preprocessing, spatial segmentation, and statistical classification of imaging MS datasets. It serves workflows in proteomics, lipidomics, and spatial metabolomics research. Released in Bioconductor 3.23 (v3.14.0).
- toolBioconductorJun 13, 2026FRASER
FRASER (Find Rare Aberrant Splicing Events in RNA-seq) detects rare aberrant splicing events in transcriptome data using an autoencoder to model read-count expectations and a beta-binomial distribution to score outliers. It supports alternative splicing and intron-retention detection and is optimised for rare disease diagnosis pipelines. Released in Bioconductor 3.23 (v2.8.0).
- toolMann Labs / Nature BiotechnologyJun 13, 2026AlphaDIA – Modular Open DIA Proteomics Search with Transfer Learning
AlphaDIA is an open-source, feature-free DIA (data-independent acquisition) proteomics search engine that performs machine learning directly on raw mass spectrometry signals, achieving end-to-end transfer learning across instruments without requiring spectral library features. Benchmarked at >120,000 precursors per run, it matches or exceeds other leading search engines. Published in Nature Biotechnology (2025); part of the AlphaX proteomics ecosystem from the Mann Lab.
- toolscverseJun 11, 2026pertpy
pertpy is a newly promoted scverse core package dedicated to single-cell perturbation experiment analysis, including CRISPR screens and compound treatments. It provides differential perturbation analysis, signature scoring, and dose-response modeling with purpose-built metadata handling and visualizations. Integrates natively with AnnData and the full scverse stack.
- toolscverse ecosystemJun 11, 2026Novae
Novae is a graph-based foundation model for spatial transcriptomics data, published in Nature Methods (2025) and integrated into the scverse ecosystem. It is a self-supervised graph attention network enabling zero-shot or fine-tuned spatial domain identification, native batch-effect correction across technologies, and spatially variable gene and pathway analysis. Trained on ~30 million cells across 18 tissues from Xenium, MERSCOPE, and CosMX platforms.
- toolNature MethodsJun 11, 2026Nicheformer: Foundation Model for Single-Cell and Spatial Omics
Nicheformer is a transformer-based foundation model published in Nature Methods (2025, vol. 22, pp. 2525–2538), pretrained on SpatialCorpus-110M — a curated corpus of over 57 million dissociated and 53 million spatially resolved cells across 73 tissues from human and mouse. The model enables prediction of spatial context for dissociated scRNA-seq cells, spatial composition prediction, and label transfer via linear probing and fine-tuning. Key finding: models trained only on dissociated data fail to recover spatial microenvironment complexity, underscoring the need for joint single-cell and spatial pretraining.