Introducing Pleiades-Neuron: a new model that can identify neuronal cell-free DNA in blood, achieving a part-per-million threshold. When neurons die, they release fragments of DNA into the bloodstream but at extremely low concentrations. Our model distinguishes neuron-derived cell-free DNA at levels as low as one part-per-million. It is 4.4× more sensitive than existing methods, and in early tests across patient samples demonstrated utility across a number of brain-related conditions. Performance improved as we scaled the size of our training corpus. It also improved with model size, with no plateau yet based on probing experiments up to 7B parameters. This could enable simple blood tests for earlier detection, prognostic monitoring, and treatment response determination in diseases of and injuries to the brain.

New paper out in Nature Communications from our group! We identified (as well as where and when) genetics affects epigenetics, Congratulations Jonathan Rosenski and Tommy Kaplan nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

New paper! wgbstools: a toolkit for fast, compact, and fragment-level DNA methylation analysis. Features compression, genomic segmentation, and easy visualization for WGBS, EM-seq, and long-read data. 🧬💻 Read more: doi.org/10.26508/lsa.2025035… #Methylation #CompBio

New paper by Jonathan Rosenski 🧬 Atlas of imprinted and allele-specific DNA methylation in the human body nature.com/articles/s41467-0…

🎉 Announcing the 2024 #ScienceBreakthrough in Emerging Talents / #FallingWallsLab! Congrats to our 1st, 2nd & 3rd place winners for groundbreaking projects that redefine what's possible. Huge thanks to all participants for inspiring us with your vision! #ScienceSummit24

Today we held the @FallingWallsLab contest at Tel Aviv University. We had an incredible group of students, alumni and creative thinkers participate. Netanel Loyfer was the first place winner with his pitch - Breaking the wall of cell-free DNA

wgbstools: A computational suite for DNA methylation sequencing data representation, visualization, and analysis biorxiv.org/cgi/content/shor… #biorxiv_bioinfo

The #Blavatnik School of Computer Science awarded the 2023 Blavatnik Prizes to four outstanding Israeli PhD students for their groundbreaking work in the field, advancing a variety of topics, from #data storage to #AI-powered medicine. Congratulations to the winners!

Netanel Loyfer on deep whole-genome bisulfite sequencing of circulating cell-free DNA for monitoring patients with congestive heart failure #AGBT23

Nature research paper: A DNA methylation atlas of normal human cell types go.nature.com/3idcUgn

A human DNA methylation atlas reveals principles of cell type-specific methylation and identifies thousands of cell type-specific regulatory elements biorxiv.org/cgi/content/shor… #bioRxiv