This week’s recap highlights Google/Deepmind’s new AlphaProteo tool for protein design, tools for protein structure alignment and analysis, biases in polygenic risk scores due to overlap and kinship, highly variable gene selection in single cell RNA-seq, and reconstruction of a 4.2 billion year old last universal common ancestor of life on Earth (spoiler alert: CRISPR-Cas is >4B years old!). Others that caught my attention include a new

Update March 2025 : The preprint described in this paper is now peer-reviewed and published in PLoS ONE. VP (Pete) Nagraj is a long time friend, colleague, and collaborator, and is the author of this post. Pete and I have co-authored over a dozen publications, and have taught several graduate courses in data science together.

This week’s recap highlights perspectives in de-extinction and patent law, systematic benchmarking of scATAC-seq methods, a 91 gigabase (!) animal genome, structural variant genotyping with long reads, cell type-specific enhancer prediction, and a perspective piece in AI in biosecurity.

TL;DR I wrote an R package that summarizes recent bioRxiv preprints using a locally running LLM via Ollama+ollamar, and produces a summary HTML report from a parameterized RMarkdown template.

Here are a few papers that caught my attention recently. I summarize a few in the deep dive at the top, then link to a few other papers of note later on. Subscribe to Paired Ends to get periodic summaries like this delivered to your e-mail.

Here are a few papers that caught my attention recently. I summarize a few in the deep dive at the top, then link to a few other papers of note later on. Subscribe to Paired Ends to get periodic summaries like this delivered to your e-mail.

I’ve been using the llama3.1:70b model just released by Meta using Ollama running on my MacBook Pro. Ollama makes it easy to talk to a locally running LLM in the terminal (ollama run llama3.1:70b) or via a familiar GUI with the open-webui Docker container. Here I’ll demonstrate using the ollamar package on CRAN to talk to an LLM running locally on my Mac.

Here are a few papers that caught my attention recently. I summarize a few in the deep dive at the top, then link to a few other papers of note later on. Subscribe to Paired Ends to get periodic summaries like this delivered to your e-mail.

It’s been a big week in the genomics+bioinformatics space. This post expands on a few of the recent papers I posted in a Twitter thread. I highlight a few in the deep dive at the top, then link to a few other papers of note later on. Subscribe (free!) to Paired Ends to get summaries like this delivered to your e-mail as soon as I write them.

This post is about the R package development experience with Positron, the new IDE from Posit based on VS Code. This is not a tutorial on R package development in general — there are great resources for that elsewhere. Read on.Subscribe to Paired Ends to get future posts like this delivered to your e-mail. RStudio, VS Code, and Positron Back in 2011 I wrote a blog post about a relatively new IDE for R called RStudio.

This post expands on a few of the papers I posted in this Twitter thread. I highlight a few in the deep dive at the top, then link to a few other papers of note later on. Subscribe to Paired Ends to get summaries like this delivered to your e-mail as soon as I write them. Subscribe now You might remember me from Getting Genetics Done where I blogged about genetics, statistics, and bioinformatics from 2008-2017.