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Feng Zhang

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@zhangf

Engineer and molecular biologist. Curious about the world and optimistic to make it better.
Cambridge, MA zlab.bio Joined April 2015
86 Following 58K Followers 304 Posts

Latest posts 5

Feng Zhang Verified account @zhangf
Another powerful use of AI agents to accelerate biological discovery. Congrats @pdhsu and team!
Patrick Hsu Verified account @pdhsu Oct 22
Delighted to share a landmark preprint from our lab, using genome language models and AI agents for biological discovery and genome mining!

The stretches of DNA between protein-coding genes are often called the genome’s “dark matter,” but they are far from empty. They encode RNA molecules that sense metabolites, regulate genes, and control some of molecular biology's most important tools (such as programmable genome editors e.g. CRISPR/bridge)

Much of this biology is unexplored. One reason is that RNAs can retain similar structures and functions even as their DNA sequences change dramatically, making their relationships difficult to recognize with conventional computational tools
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Feng Zhang Verified account @zhangf
Congrats @xinjin and @gracexyzheng! Really exciting progress.
Discovery often comes from putting familiar pieces in unexpected ways: but bio space is too vast to do that effectively?

🤖 1000s of AI agents helped connect our whole-brain Perturb-seq atlas w literature. w @OpenAI @joyjiao12: more coming! See preprint biorxiv.org/content/10.648…
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Feng Zhang Verified account @zhangf
Congratulations to @KarlDeisseroth, Peter Hegemann, and Georg Nagel on the Nobel Prize! I feel very lucky to have learned from all three, from their brilliant science and from their generosity to the scientific community.
The Nobel Prize Verified account @NobelPrize Oct 5
To understand how the brain forms memories, feelings and behaviours has long been a dream for researchers.

Karl Deisseroth, Peter Hegemann and Georg Nagel have been awarded the 2026 #NobelPrize in Physiology or Medicine for discoveries leading to optogenetics, which makes it possible to switch on, or off, the activity of individual nerve cells in a living brain.

This method is now being used in laboratories around the world to reveal the brain’s mysteries.
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Feng Zhang Verified account @zhangf
Beautiful study. There is so much in microbial genomes we still don’t understand. Exciting to see the use of genome language models powering the discovery of these cool new systems. Congrats to @_david_li, @garykbrixi, @brianhie, and the team!
David Li @_David_Li Sep 22
Excited to share Minerva, our approach using genome language models for biological discovery! Using Minerva, we find that UG27 reverse transcriptase systems encode variable arrays of diverse ncRNAs with a shared structure, each templating a short DNA hairpin. With @garykbrixi.
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