microscopy

Today in AI for life science: AI-designed proteins become new tools to see inside living cells, generative models write genomes on demand, and a synthesis breakthrough finally lets labs build what AI dreams up.

Today in AI for life science: vision-language models turn microscopes into conversational instruments, a reality check on the gap between seeing and understanding an image, and multimodal pathology models fusing slides with clinical text at scale.

Today in AI for life science: cell-segmentation foundation models reach a superhuman generalist in Cellpose-SAM, a 2026 benchmark shows no single model wins everywhere, and the frontier pushes into 3D light-sheet microscopy.

Today in AI for life science: a cell-language model proposes a cancer lead that holds up in the wet lab, agents turn plain-language requests into reproducible image analysis, and microscopes start deciding what to image themselves.

Today in AI for life science: Biohub’s protein world model designs cancer binders that work in the wet lab, ’thinking microscopes’ turn instruments into co-scientists, and a sharp reminder that predictions still have to survive the bench.

At an invited talk at CZI, we ran a live, fully agent-controlled wet-lab experiment on the REEF Imaging Farm. A single natural-language prompt set an entire lab in motion, on real cells, in real time. We interviewed the agent that ran it.

A self-driving cell-biology lab where AI agents plan, run and adapt live-cell experiments across a cluster of instruments.

Wei Ouyang and Hanzhao Zhang wrote the ‘Large Language Models and AI Agents’ chapter for AI in Microscopy: A BioImaging Guide (HHMI Janelia) — a tour from deep learning to autonomous, agent-driven bioimage analysis.

Today in AI for life science: an AI agent that drives ImageJ, the case for ’thinking microscopes’ that run their own experiments, and a foundation model that imagines how cells morph under perturbation.

Control microscopes in plain language — LLM agents that turn scientific intent into imaging, segmentation, and analysis.