Sarah Gurev
sarahgurev.bsky.social
Sarah Gurev
@sarahgurev.bsky.social
Postdoc @ Debbie Marks Lab, Harvard | Prev. PhD @ MIT EECS || ML for Proteins + Viruses 🦠
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
End-to-end protein design in the browser through evedesign. Generate and interactively explore designs in 2D/3D and export them as codon-optimized DNA. The underlying open source framework (released soon) is build to easily add new methods, more on that soon.
🌐 evedesign.bio
October 22, 2025 at 2:30 PM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
Thrilled to announce our new preprint, “Protein Hunter: Exploiting Structure Hallucination within Diffusion for Protein Design,” in collaboration with @Griffin, @GBhardwaj8 and @sokrypton.org

🧬Code and notebooks will be released by the end of this week.
🎧Golden- Kpop Demon Hunters
October 13, 2025 at 3:45 PM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
Large AI models are reported to achieve high accuracy (AUROC) predicting pathogenic variants across the genome.

A preprint reports that the predictions are based on splice variants. Using only this info (no sequences, no AI) achieves AUROC=0.944 across noncoding variants.

1/2
September 9, 2025 at 11:01 PM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
In new study led by @ckikawa.bsky.social, we provide near real-time data on human neutralizing antibody landscape to influenza by measuring ~26,000 titers to >100 recent viral strains

Data can inform vaccine selection & evolutionary/epidemiological modeling
www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Near real-time data on the human neutralizing antibody landscape to influenza virus to inform vaccine-strain selection in September 2025
The hemagglutinin of human influenza virus evolves rapidly to erode neutralizing antibody immunity. Twice per year, new vaccine strains are selected with the goal of providing maximum protection again...
www.biorxiv.org
September 8, 2025 at 9:48 PM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
There’s been a bunch of new approaches looking at deep viral evolutionary history. We’ve put together a mini review highlighting some recent advancements in structural phylogenetics and time-dependent rate models and what they could do for the field 🦠
🔗 journals.asm.org/doi/full/10....
Recent advances in the inference of deep viral evolutionary history | Journal of Virology
Phylogenetic studies examining the origins, emergence, and spread of viruses have arguably been one of the most active and successful areas of evolutionary biology and form the bedrock of the flourishing field of genomic epidemiology. This, in part, reflects the ability of viruses, particularly those with RNA genomes, to evolve at rates much greater than their cellular counterparts (1). The rapid rate at which viruses evolve and accumulate mutations enables evolutionary signals to be identified through comparative genomics at short timescales relevant for outbreak investigation and response. The integration of phylogenetics and epidemiology, known as phylodynamics, has become a vital tool in response to numerous viral outbreaks, epidemics, and pandemics, including Ebola (2), Zika (3), and, more recently, COVID-19 (4) and mpox (5).
journals.asm.org
August 25, 2025 at 8:32 PM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
Excited to share our new preprint co-led by @jnoms.bsky.social!

Here we reveal an exceptional diversity of viral 2H phosphodiesterases (PDEs) that enable immune evasion by selectively degrading oligonucleotide-based messengers. This 2H PDE fold has evolved striking substrate breath & specificity.
Divergent viral phosphodiesterases for immune signaling evasion
Cyclic dinucleotides (CDNs) and other short oligonucleotides play fundamental roles in immune system activation in organisms ranging from bacteria to humans. In response, viruses use phosphodiesterase...
www.biorxiv.org
August 22, 2025 at 7:02 PM
🚨New paper 🚨

Can protein language models help us fight viral outbreaks? Not yet. Here’s why 🧵👇
1/12
August 17, 2025 at 3:42 AM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
Stoked to finally have a preprint out for Phold, our tool that uses protein structural information to enhance phage genome annotation #phagesky 1/n

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
Protein Structure Informed Bacteriophage Genome Annotation with Phold
Bacteriophage (phage) genome annotation is essential for understanding their functional potential and suitability for use as therapeutic agents. Here we introduce Phold, an annotation framework utilis...
www.biorxiv.org
August 8, 2025 at 7:11 AM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
Excited to share work with
Zhidian Zhang, @milot.bsky.social, @martinsteinegger.bsky.social, and @sokrypton.org
biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
TLDR: We introduce MSA Pairformer, a 111M parameter protein language model that challenges the scaling paradigm in self-supervised protein language modeling🧵
Scaling down protein language modeling with MSA Pairformer
Recent efforts in protein language modeling have focused on scaling single-sequence models and their training data, requiring vast compute resources that limit accessibility. Although models that use ...
biorxiv.org
August 5, 2025 at 6:31 AM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
Some great new features and updates from the awesome Pathoplexus project. This is a new open pathogen genome database that can provide access to your sequences under a use-restricted license but also feed directly in to INSDC (EBI, Genbank etc) when you are ready. pathoplexus.org/news/2025-07...
Pathoplexus | Pathoplexus July Update
Pathoplexus is a new, open-source database dedicated to the efficient sharing of human viral pathogen genomic data, fostering global collaboration and public health response.
pathoplexus.org
July 15, 2025 at 2:05 PM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
🚨 New paper 🚨 RNA modeling just got its own Gym! 🏋️ Introducing RNAGym, large-scale benchmarks for RNA fitness and structure prediction.
🧵 1/9
June 18, 2025 at 7:35 PM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
End-to-end differentiable homology search for protein fitness prediction.

@yaringal.bsky.social @deboramarks.bsky.social @pascalnotin.bsky.social

arxiv.org/abs/2506.089...
June 11, 2025 at 7:00 PM
Reposted by Sarah Gurev
Hello everyone! I am pleased to share information on the first ever Computational Structural Virology Symposium, conducted August 4th on zoom and highlighting work in this emerging field. You can register for this event here: forms.gle/CNiqskMwQEuV.... Please re-post!
June 12, 2025 at 8:31 PM