Enhancing non-local interaction modeling for ab initio biomolecular calculations and simulations with ViSNet-PIMA

This paper introduces ViSNet-PIMA, a novel machine learning force field that utilizes a physics-informed multipole aggregator to effectively model non-local interactions, significantly outperforming state-of-the-art methods in biomolecular energy and force predictions and enhancing the accuracy of AI-based molecular dynamics simulations.

Cui, T., Wang, Z., Wang, T.2026-03-20💻 bioinformatics

Differentiable Gene Set Enrichment Analysis for Pathway-Level Supervision in Transcriptomic Learning

This paper introduces differentiable GSEA (dGSEA), a scalable and numerically stable surrogate for classical Gene Set Enrichment Analysis that enables pathway-level supervision in transcriptomic prediction models by replacing discrete ranking operations with differentiable approximations, thereby bridging the gap between gene-wise training objectives and pathway-level interpretation.

Li, S., Ruan, Y., Yang, X. + 2 more2026-03-20💻 bioinformatics

HViLM: A Foundation Model for Viral Genomics Enables Multi-Task Prediction of Pathogenicity, Transmissibility, and Host Tropism

The paper introduces HViLM, the first foundation model for pan-viral genomic analysis, which achieves state-of-the-art performance in predicting pathogenicity, host tropism, and transmissibility across diverse viral families through continued pre-training on 5 million non-redundant viral sequences and parameter-efficient fine-tuning.

Davuluri, R. V., Dutta, P., Vaska, J. + 5 more2026-03-20💻 bioinformatics

Systematic assessment of machine learning-based variant annotation methods for rare variant association testing

This study systematically benchmarks five machine learning-based variant annotation methods across UK Biobank data, revealing that CADD v1.6 achieves the best signal separation while AlphaMissense shows calibration issues, ultimately providing practical guidance for method selection and a new framework for calibration assessment in rare variant association testing.

Aguirre, M., Irudayanathan, F. J., Crow, M. + 5 more2026-03-20💻 bioinformatics

Disagreement among variant effect predictors guides experimental prioritization of target proteins

This study demonstrates that because agreement among computational variant effect predictors does not correlate with their accuracy against experimental data, prioritizing proteins with high inter-predictor disagreement is an effective strategy for selecting targets for resource-intensive experimental characterization to maximize informational value.

Jonsson, N. F., Marsh, J. A., Lindorff-Larsen, K.2026-03-20💻 bioinformatics

PanXpress: Gene expression quantification with a pan-transcriptomic gapped k-mer index

PanXpress is a unified, efficient, and accurate framework for bacterial gene expression quantification that utilizes a pan-transcriptomic gapped k-mer index to overcome reference bias in mixed-strain samples by directly constructing references from genomic data and outperforming existing tools in precision, speed, and memory usage.

Alves Ferreira, I., Zentgraf, J., Schmitz, J. E. + 1 more2026-03-20💻 bioinformatics

GatorSC: Multi-Scale Cell and Gene Graphs with Mixture-of-Experts Fusion for Single-Cell Transcriptomics

GatorSC is a unified, self-supervised representation learning framework that integrates multi-scale cell and gene graphs via a Mixture-of-Experts architecture to produce robust embeddings, outperforming state-of-the-art methods in cell clustering, gene imputation, and biological discovery across diverse single-cell RNA sequencing datasets.

Liu, Y., Zhang, Z., Qiu, M. + 7 more2026-03-19💻 bioinformatics