Arc Institute

I do see a tick up in interest in tRNAs, especially in cancer, but let’s be honest, it’s still not a popular topic. And this is exactly the kind of research that owes its existence to @arcinstitute...

Hundreds of human tRNA genes form a redundant repertoire for decoding the genetic code. But does redundancy imply functional equivalence?

A pan-cancer in vivo CRISPRi atlas from @genophoria and Vijay Ramani at @GladstoneInst reveals a structured landscape of tRNA dependencies.

Honored to be alongside so many amazing colleagues and grateful to my lab and mentors for their partnership and inspiration. This is for them, and for fundamental research

Most perturbation models learn only from experiments. Our new model, PIE, also draws on decades of curated biological knowledge to predict which genes respond to a perturbation, even in biological contexts and for perturbations it has never seen.

Virtual cell models are only as good as the data they learn from. To predict how any cell type responds to a perturbation, models need high-quality causal data generated across contexts, so technical noise doesn't masquerade as biology.

Many important bacterial non-coding RNAs and structural elements remain undiscovered. To help, @_David_Li, @garykbrixi, @mfgrp, @BrianHie & team introduce Minerva, which uses a genome language model to predict RNA base pairing, repeats, & other interactions from sequence alone.

Want to join Arc? We're hiring experts in disease bio, computational bio, functional genomics, and NGS for our Tech Centers, plus postdocs and research associates in our Core Labs. All roles are based in Palo Alto, and are on-site or hybrid.

Learn more or apply here: arcinstitute.org/jobs

Loss of function for 1 gene can make a cancer cell resist a DNA damage response (DDR) inhibitor, while another gene can make it easy to kill. Core Investigator @LukeGilbertSF and collaborators mapped both across five DDR inhibitors and found loss of PRDX1 sensitizes cells to all five.

Our ancestors emerged on a primitive Earth that lacked oxygen. @ishahjain, @AyushDMidha, and team found a surprising way that we still use their coping strategies today. arcinstitute.org/news/ancient-a…

Science Fellow @zhou_jingtian builds single-cell and computational frameworks to probe the 3D genome. His work tells us more about how the epigenome and transcriptome interact to shape cell state and complex disease:
arcinstitute.org/news/jingtian-…

Nearly 300 teams have already submitted to the Virtual Cell Challenge leaderboard to see how their initial models rank on this year’s six metrics.

Here’s the current standing:

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 Challenge-specific training data.

arcinstitute.org/news/virtual-c…

Evolution builds genes by recombining domains from existing ones. Innovation Investigator @Roth_Lab and colleagues introduce DESynR, a platform that does this on demand, creating new genes that outperform their natural counterparts in human CAR T cells.

Four years ago, a mystery case led Core Investigator @jvpluv to discover a new diagnosis (ABCD). Today his team published one of the largest clinical surveys of unexplained spinal cord disease to date in @JAMANeuro, finding ABCD in roughly half of patients.

The same method that teaches an LLM which answers people prefer can teach a protein model which sequences are more stable.

This is the basis for ProteinDPO, developed by Innovation Investigator @BrianHie, @talaldotpdb, and team.

In 2024, we introduced universal DNA rearrangement with bridge RNA. Now, in @Nature, @pdhsu @hnisimasu & team solve the structural mechanism of bridge excision—how the complex assembles for intramolecular recombination—yielding new engineering handles for programmable biology.

One of our most popular preprints of 2025 is now published in @ScienceMagazine. Congrats to @BrianHie, @samuelhking, and team on establishing a framework for generating and evaluating AI-generated genomes.

- Access the paper: science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…

Pre-registration for the 2026 Virtual Cell Challenge opens today. Start building your team and say hello in our Discord. The full competition launches August 20.
virtualcellchallenge.org

The Proto team from @BrianHie's lab will be at the re:AGENT hackathon, a two-day weekend (8/15–8/16) in San Francisco for people interested in building AI scientists, datasets, or pipelines for biological design.

Apply by Thursday, July 30th, 12 PM PT at luma.com/g6org075

Congrats to Science Fellow @zhou_jingtian and team on their human epigenome atlas, now out in @ScienceMagazine. They show that grouping cells by DNA methylation or chromatin structure yields different subtypes in some lineages but not others:
science.org/doi/10.1126/sc…