Agentic systems are adept at solving well-scoped, verifiable problems in computational biology

This paper introduces CompBioBench, a novel benchmark of 100 diverse computational biology tasks constructed via synthetic data augmentation and metadata scrambling to enable objective evaluation, demonstrating that leading agentic systems like Codex CLI and Claude Code can achieve high accuracy in solving complex, multi-step biological problems requiring tool use and external resource interaction.

Nair, S., Gunsalus, L., Orcutt-Jahns, B. + 8 more2026-04-09💻 bioinformatics

A Shape Analysis Algorithm Quantifies Spatial Morphology and Context of 2D to 3D Cell Culture for Correlating Novel Phenotypes with Treatment Resistance

This paper introduces the Linearized Compressed Polar Coordinates (LCPC) Transform, a novel algorithm that converts 2D and 3D cell contours into discrete sinusoidal waves to capture spatial context features like chirality, thereby enabling robust quantitative stratification of morphological phenotypes to correlate with treatment resistance.

Nguyen, D. H., Bruck, M., Rosenbluth, J.2026-04-08💻 bioinformatics

Adaptive Integration of Heterogeneous Foundation Models to Find Histologically Predictable Genes in Breast Cancer

This paper proposes an adaptive integration framework that combines heterogeneous foundation models via a lightweight weighting network to predict histologically relevant genes from breast cancer histopathology images, achieving superior accuracy and interpretability compared to individual models and classical ensembling methods when validated against spatial transcriptomics data.

Nguyen, H., Li, C., Peng, C. + 3 more2026-04-08💻 bioinformatics