Update from the first few months at the Diffuse Project: building towards integrated methods, data, models, and encodings so the community can routinely use diffuse scattering in basic biology and drug discovery https://lnkd.in/gjSKq6vQ
Diffuse Project
Biotechnology Research
Infrastructure for learning and representing protein motions from structural data
About us
The era of static structure prediction is here. The next frontier lies in understanding dynamics. Macromolecules do not act as rigid entities; their functions emerge from ensembles of motions shaped by structure, environment, and interactions. We are only beginning to appreciate how these motions contribute to recognition, catalysis, and regulation. We are in a state of exponential growth of new methods for collecting, modeling, and possibly predicting the flexibility ensembles. One of the most exciting aspects of this emerging frontier is that the details of conformational ensembles are often embedded within the experimental data used to derive the static macromolecular structures we’ve been collecting for decades. By learning directly from this raw data, we may be able to better converge on a macromolecule’s conformational ensemble. Beyond this, correctly representing and encoding the outputs of structural modeling is essential for translating them into biological insight. To enable AI co-driven scientific discovery, these representations must be both machine-readable and human-interpretable. Achieving this will require a transformation in how we collect, encode, and interact with biological data, building infrastructure that allows algorithms to learn from the full complexity of experimental observations while remaining accessible to human reasoning.
- Website
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https://diffuse.science
External link for Diffuse Project
- Industry
- Biotechnology Research
- Company size
- 11-50 employees
- Type
- Nonprofit
- Founded
- 2025
Updates
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The Diffuse Project is looking for an amazing Project Manager to help us achieve our goal of unlocking protein dynamics! Are you a scientist who naturally loves organization, coordination, problem solving and working with a diverse team of scientists & engineers? Apply here! https://lnkd.in/eCFbe46M
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Today, we're excited to announce the Diffuse Project - a groundbreaking initiative to advance protein dynamics research through diffuse X-ray scattering. While structural biology has made tremendous progress in understanding static protein structures, proteins are inherently dynamic. Their functions depend critically on motion and state fluctuations that have been difficult to measure experimentally. See the announcement: https://lnkd.in/ghNm-6YW We're committed to sharing our methods early and openly to maximize impact across the structural biology community. Learn more about our approach and follow our progress: https://diffuse.science And, we’re hiring! Check out our postings for a Machine Learning Scientist, a Machine Learning Infrastructure Engineer, and a Software Engineer: https://lnkd.in/eCFbe46M Want to get involved, share your ideas, or just stay in the loop with email updates? Let us know here: https://lnkd.in/ecdDKDFt
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Diffuse Project reposted this
We look for projects that reimagine how open science is done. The diffUSE Project is one such project that we’re proud to fund. It’s a research effort to explore protein motion that uses room-temperature crystallography and a redesigned experimental pipeline. Astera is committing a seed fund of $5M, in addition to compute access through Voltage Park. These resources are distributed across Astera’s Diffuse team and several research groups, including those of James Fraser at University of California, San Francisco, Nozomi Ando at Cornell University, Stephanie Wankowicz at Vanderbilt University, James Holton at the Lawrence Berkeley Lab beamline, Steve Meisburger at the Cornell High Energy Synchrotron Source (CHESS) beamline, and Michael Wall at the Los Alamos National Laboratory beamline. We are also excited that the team will be experimenting with new modes of publishing, entirely outside of traditional journals. Read more on the project and principles for how we build towards the next era of scientific breakthroughs in this essay by Seemay Chou: https://lnkd.in/ghNm-6YW
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