https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/21/well/medicine-cabinet.html
NYTimes: Is Your Medicine Cabinet a Mess?
February 14, 2026The Last Decision of Daniel Kahneman, the World’s Leading Thinker on Decisions – WSJ
February 14, 2026UW-Madison BMI/CS 776 Advanced Bioinformatics
February 14, 2026course website
https://www.biostat.wisc.edu/bmi776/
and https://www.biostat.wisc.edu/bmi776/syllabus.html
canvas for intro bioinformatics. This was the previous website in 2017, https://www.biostat.wisc.edu/bmi576/syllabus.html
Chocolate Lamp! đź’ˇ Can you believe it actually works? #amauryguichon #chocolate – YouTube
February 13, 2026Quick comment request on AlphaGenome for IBM Think
February 11, 2026Brodsky, S. (2026, February 10). AI models at IBM and DeepMind are pushing DNA toward a GPT era. IBM Think.
https://www.ibm.com/think/news/ibm-deepmind-ai-models-pushing-dna-toward-gpt-era
QT:{{
“What I found most novel about AlphaGenome was its multimodal nature,” Mark Gerstein, the Albert L Williams Professor of Biomedical Informatics at Yale University, and who was not involved in the research, told IBM Think in an interview. “The fact that it is trained on data from many different genomic modalities—for instance, RNA-seq, ATAC-seq and Hi-C—and predicts effects across these modalities is particularly notable.”
Gerstein said AlphaGenome stands out because it tries to predict multiple genomic signals simultaneously and treats them as connected rather than independent. Changes in chromatin state upstream, for example, can shape gene expression downstream—and models have long recognized those links. What’s new, in his view, is the scale at which AlphaGenome tries to fold those relationships directly into
sequence-to-function prediction.
He also highlighted how much DNA the model can “see” in one pass. The window, he said, is unusually large, on the order of a megabase. It’s a span big enough to capture regulatory effects that can sit far from the genes they influence.
…
Gerstein’s reaction comes with an asterisk: he called the results promising, but stressed that performance on curated benchmarks doesn’t always translate to messy real-world biology.
AlphaGenome, as he sees it, is powerful at describing what a single change might do within a genome model. But real genomes do not change one letter at a time. They come as whole, inherited packages, full of variants that shape one another’s effects. “In terms of limitations, one major issue is that the model predicts the effect of only a single variant and does not take into account the full genetic background of an individual’s personal genome,” he said. “Background genetics can substantially influence the impact of a particular variant,
particularly by strongly affecting how a gene is expressed in response to a mutation.”
He thinks the next step is imaginable, even if it is harder: a future version of this kind of work could move beyond scoring a single mutation in isolation and instead operate directly on personal genomes. “One could imagine extending AlphaGenome by building large models that operate directly on personal genomes,” he said.
Medicine demands forms of evidence that many model developers simply do not have access to, Gerstein noted.
“With respect to translation into clinical practice, the main requirement is the accumulation of many use cases in which the effects of particular mutations are documented, followed by downstream validation showing that the predictions are accurate and clinically useful,” Gerstein said. “There is no substitute in the medical world for experimental data and actual clinical validation, and this will be necessary before outputs from tools like this are accepted.” ….
He also stressed what AlphaGenome does not claim to do: “It is important to remember that this tool provides the molecular
consequences of specific mutations, not downstream phenotypic or disease-level effects,” he said. “As a result, additional work would be required to bridge that gap.”
“With respect to translation into clinical practice, the main requirement is the accumulation of many use cases in which the effects of particular mutations are documented, followed by downstream validation showing that the predictions are accurate and clinically useful,” Gerstein said. “In the medical world, there is no substitute for experimental data and actual clinical validation.”
“}}
Blepharitis | National Eye Institute
February 10, 2026White Plains Hospital | Award-winning Westchester hospital
February 9, 2026White Plains Hospital | Award-winning Westchester hospital
https://www.wphospital.org/
Exclusive: Have scientists found Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA? | Science | AAAS
February 4, 2026I think you should definitely contact her for professional meeting (and then ask about Sophie possibly meeting with her and learning)
On Sun, Feb 1, 2026 at 5:40 PM Mark Gerstein <mark> wrote:
QT: {{"
The hunt for Leonardo’s DNA has been a high-profile proving ground for
“arteomics,” an emerging field that could transform how the art world
authenticates and protects its most precious objects (see sidebar,
below). Today, authorship decisions hinge on expert opinion on, for
example, how a brushstroke was made. “Connoisseurship is still what
counts,” says LDVP chair Jesse Ausubel, an environmental scientist at
Rockefeller University who previously led a major project to census
the diversity of marine life.
…
With human Y chromosome and other nuclear DNA sequences from both the
drawing and the letters in hand, the LDVP team approached Lee, a Y
chromosome expert, in late 2024. Lee was intrigued, and LDVP sent him
blinded sequence data from swabs of Holy Child, several Frosino
letters, and the cheeks of the scientists who sampled the materials.
….
Lee, Loftus, and Jackson geneticist Pille Hallast compared the
sequences with a panel of some 90,000 known markers—changes in
individual base pairs—that group Y chromosome sequences into lineages
called haplogroups. Four samples from Holy Child and the Frosino
letters could be reliably assigned a haplogroup—and they all converged
on E1b1b, a lineage found in the Tuscany area that Leonardo’s extended
family might have carried.
….
When Andrew Miranker peers at a Blakelock canvas, he sees more than
brushwork and varnish. He sees a molecular archive. “Paint is a
recording device,” says Miranker, a biophysicist at Yale University.
As oil paint slowly cures, it traps fragments of DNA—human, animal,
microbial—along with the dust and air of a studio. By interrogating
vanishingly small samples of the strata on supposed Blakelock
canvases, Miranker’s team hopes to uncover clues to whether they were
done by the artist himself or a clever forger.
….
For instance, minuscule paint flakes from an oil painting of a family
farmhouse by John Fairbanks, an American artist from the turn of the
20th century, yielded genetic signatures of farm animals, a dog, and
regional crops such as wheat and clover.
…
DNA often gets star billing, but proteins can also be telling, says
Julie Arslanoglu, an organic chemist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art
who co-founded Art Bio Matters, an international consortium decoding
molecular signatures in art.
…
She and University of Bordeaux analytical chemist Caroline Tokarski, a
pioneer in applying proteomic analysis to artworks, probed a
long-standing puzzle about 18th century English artist Thomas
Gainsborough. …. In 1773, Gainsborough wrote to a friend describing
a “secret recipe” for preventing smoke’s dimming effects: He dipped
drawings in skim milk.
…
To test that claim, the Met-Bordeaux team analyzed rubbings from
Gainsborough drawings in the Morgan Library & Museum. Their results,
published in Heritage Science in 2020, confirmed the legend: The
coating on Gainsborough’s sketches, including Hilly Landscape with
Cows on the Road, contained bovine milk proteins, especially casein.
But exactly how the artist applied the skim milk—and why it
helped—remains a riddle."}}
https://www.science.org/content/article/have-scientists-found-leonardo-da-vinci-s-dna
Exclusive: Have scientists found Leonardo da Vinci’s DNA? | Science | AAAS
February 1, 2026QT: {{”
The hunt for Leonardo’s DNA has been a high-profile proving ground for “arteomics,” an emerging field that could transform how the art world authenticates and protects its most precious objects (see sidebar, below). Today, authorship decisions hinge on expert opinion on, for example, how a brushstroke was made. “Connoisseurship is still what counts,” says LDVP chair Jesse Ausubel, an environmental scientist at Rockefeller University who previously led a major project to census the diversity of marine life.
…
With human Y chromosome and other nuclear DNA sequences from both the drawing and the letters in hand, the LDVP team approached Lee, a Y chromosome expert, in late 2024. Lee was intrigued, and LDVP sent him blinded sequence data from swabs of Holy Child, several Frosino letters, and the cheeks of the scientists who sampled the materials. ….
Lee, Loftus, and Jackson geneticist Pille Hallast compared the sequences with a panel of some 90,000 known markers—changes in individual base pairs—that group Y chromosome sequences into lineages called haplogroups. Four samples from Holy Child and the Frosino letters could be reliably assigned a haplogroup—and they all converged on E1b1b, a lineage found in the Tuscany area that Leonardo’s extended family might have carried.
….
When Andrew Miranker peers at a Blakelock canvas, he sees more than brushwork and varnish. He sees a molecular archive. “Paint is a recording device,” says Miranker, a biophysicist at Yale University. As oil paint slowly cures, it traps fragments of DNA—human, animal, microbial—along with the dust and air of a studio. By interrogating vanishingly small samples of the strata on supposed Blakelock canvases, Miranker’s team hopes to uncover clues to whether they were done by the artist himself or a clever forger.
….
For instance, minuscule paint flakes from an oil painting of a family farmhouse by John Fairbanks, an American artist from the turn of the 20th century, yielded genetic signatures of farm animals, a dog, and regional crops such as wheat and clover.
…
DNA often gets star billing, but proteins can also be telling, says Julie Arslanoglu, an organic chemist at the Metropolitan Museum of Art who co-founded Art Bio Matters, an international consortium decoding molecular signatures in art.
…
She and University of Bordeaux analytical chemist Caroline Tokarski, a pioneer in applying proteomic analysis to artworks, probed a long-standing puzzle about 18th century English artist Thomas Gainsborough. …. In 1773, Gainsborough wrote to a friend describing a “secret recipe” for preventing smoke’s dimming effects: He dipped drawings in skim milk.
…
To test that claim, the Met-Bordeaux team analyzed rubbings from Gainsborough drawings in the Morgan Library & Museum. Their results, published in Heritage Science in 2020, confirmed the legend: The coating on Gainsborough’s sketches, including Hilly Landscape with Cows on the Road, contained bovine milk proteins, especially casein. But exactly how the artist applied the skim milk—and why it
helped—remains a riddle.
“}}
https://www.science.org/content/article/have-scientists-found-leonardo-da-vinci-s-dna
linkstream2 microblog 