An open-source drug discovery platform enables ultra-large virtual screens | Nature
On average, an approved drug today costs $2-3 billion and takes over ten years to develop. In part, this is due to expensive and time-consuming wet-lab experiments, poor initial hit compounds, and the high attrition rates in the (pre-)clinical phases. Structure-based virtual screening (SBVS) has the potential to mitigate these problems. With SBVS, the quality of the hits improves with the number of compounds screened. Here researchers designed VirtualFlow, a highly automated and versatile open-source platform with perfect scaling behaviour that is able to prepare and efficiently screen ultra-large ligand libraries of compounds.
Longitudinal survey of microbiome associated with particulate matter in a megacity | Genome Biology
While the physical and chemical properties of airborne particulate matter (PM) have been extensively studied, their associated microbiome remains largely unexplored. Here, researchers performed a longitudinal metagenomic survey of 106 samples of airborne PM2.5 and PM10 in Beijing over a period of 6 months in 2012 and 2013, including those from several historically severe smog events. They observed that the microbiome composition and functional potential were conserved between PM2.5 and PM10, although considerable temporal variations existed.
Deep learning models for electrocardiograms are susceptible to adversarial attack | Nature Medicine
Electrocardiogram (ECG) acquisition is increasingly widespread in medical and commercial devices, necessitating the development of automated interpretation strategies. Recently, deep neural networks have been used to automatically analyze ECG tracings and outperform physicians in detecting certain rhythm irregularities. Here researchers develop a method to construct smoothed adversarial examples for ECG tracings that are invisible to human expert evaluation and show that a deep learning model for arrhythmia detection from single-lead ECG is vulnerable to this type of attack.