NEWS.

A BMC Microbiology paper mined 9 Arctic Mid-Ocean Ridge hydrothermal-vent biofilms via metagenomics, metatranscriptomics, and machine-learning prediction, identifying 873 unique antimicrobial peptide sequences with no match in existing databases. 25 of 51 contributing phyla showed active expression. 16.7% predicted active against clinical pathogens, with Acinetobacter baumannii most susceptible. Of four synthesized leads, OLKFNNDA_52_10 showed moderate S. aureus activity with low human-cell cytotoxicity.

HighFold-MeD2, an enhancement of the open-source Boltz-2 structure-prediction model, handles cyclic peptides containing backbone N-methylated and d-amino acids, the modifications that drive cyclic-peptide drug-class metabolic stability and oral bioavailability. The model uses Chemical Component Dictionary representations rather than hard-coded non-canonical amino acid entries, making it extensible without retraining. It outperforms HighFold-MeD, AlphaFold3, and Boltz-2 baseline on cyclic-peptide structure prediction.

RoBERTcr is a 152-million-parameter language model trained specifically on T-cell receptor sequences. A new Bioinformatics paper reports it beats Meta's ESM and other general protein language models on TCR-peptide binding prediction, and learns the binding interface from sequence alone.

POTFlow, a flow-matching generative model conditioned on a known lead peptide, designed candidates targeting ATP5A in glioblastoma. The peptides selectively cut tumor cell viability and prolonged survival in patient-derived xenograft mice, closing the design-to-validation loop on a hard cancer target.

Two new research papers tested whether AI can design drug molecules. General-purpose chatbot-style AIs collapse on specific targets. A specialized tool built for one narrow peptide job found 76 working candidates where the broad approach found zero.

Microsoft researchers pulled every lab-tested AI drug design result into one scorecard. Binders work. Antibodies are inconsistent. Enzymes are harder. One target keeps beating the AI.