Biology subjects

Zhou, I.

Publications and source records attributed to Zhou, I..

4 recordsLinked to original sources

bioRxiv2026

LifeSciBench: Evaluating Language Models on Realistic, Expert-Level Tasks in the Life Sciences

We introduce LifeSciBench, a benchmark of 750 expert-authored tasks designed to evaluate whether language models can handle realistic life science research work. The majority of existing life sciences benchmarks have a narrow scope or are purely knowledge-based, and therefore fail to capture the complexity of real-world research, which often involves ambiguities and requires the accurate execution of multiple dependent judgment calls. Additionally, almost all existing benchmarks span at best a small collection of subdomains within the life sciences; there is at present no existing life sciences benchmark with both the requisite breadth and depth required to convincingly measure proficiency in real-world professional research settings. LifeSciBench addresses this gap by spanning seven representative scientific workflows and seven life science domains, with each constituent task paired with a human expert-written rubric. Across five frontier and domain-specialized models, GPT-Rosalind performs best, with a task-weighted mean normalized rubric score of 0.576 and a task-weighted response pass rate of 36.1% (response-level values are first averaged within each task, and the resulting task-level values are then averaged with equal weight). LifeSciBench remains unsaturated, with 171 tasks (22.8%) having no observed passing response from any evaluated model and 261 tasks (34.8%) having a best-model pass rate below 20%. LifeSciBench therefore serves as a high-resolution evaluation of practical scientific reasoning and operational decision-making in the life sciences.

bioinformatics↗

bioRxiv2025

Stress drives the hippocampus to prioritize statistical prediction over episodic encoding

The hippocampus plays a critical role in encoding individual experiences into episodic memory, while also detecting patterns shared across these experiences that allow us to anticipate future events via statistical learning. Acute stress is known to impact the hippocampus but may have opposite effects on these competing functions. That is, although stress impairs episodic encoding, it may instead enhance statistical learning. Using functional magnetic resonance imaging, we tested how stress influences the hippocampal pathways and subfields that support episodic encoding and statistical learning while participants performed a task that engaged both processes. Across several analyses, stress biased hippocampal processing in favour of statistical learning, suppressing pattern separation between events in the dentate gyrus and enhancing the representation of statistically predictive features. Furthermore, stress drove the hippocampal monosynaptic pathway to support statistical learning rather than episodic encoding during predictive situations. Together, these data suggest that acute stress elicits targeted, adaptive changes in hippocampal pathways which may facilitate predicting and responding to upcoming events.

neuroscience↗

bioRxiv2025

CSF1R+ macrophage and osteoclast depletion impairs neural crest proliferation and craniofacial morphogenesis

Despite a wealth of knowledge on the mechanisms underlying craniofacial morphogenesis during gestation, the roles of fetal macrophages and osteoclasts during this process remain less well characterized. Here, we used the pharmacological inhibitor PLX5622 to disrupt colony stimulating factor-1 receptor (CSF1R) signaling, which is essential for macrophage and osteoclast proliferation, differentiation, and survival. Prenatal PLX5622 exposure resulted in [~]50% depletion of CSF1R+ macrophages, with complete loss of osteoclasts. While there were no notable changes in craniofacial nerve or muscle development, prenatal exposure to PLX5622 resulted in skull doming and cranial suture impairments, in addition to disruptions to development of the premaxilla, mandible, ear ossicles, palate, and cranial base. In response to PLX5622 exposure, cytokine and chemokine signaling was altered and neural crest proliferation was impaired. Our data also highlight sex- and strain-specific differences in PLX5622 phenotypes and together demonstrate that CSF1R+ macrophages and osteoclasts are essential for craniofacial morphogenesis.

developmental biology↗

bioRxiv2021

THINGS-EEG: Human electroencephalography recordings for 1,854 concepts presented in rapid serial visual presentation streams

The neural basis of object recognition and semantic knowledge has been extensively studied but the high dimensionality of object space makes it challenging to develop overarching theories on how the brain organises object knowledge. To help understand how the brain allows us to recognise, categorise, and represent objects and object categories, there is a growing interest in using large-scale image databases for neuroimaging experiments. In the current paper, we present THINGS-EEG, a dataset containing human electroencephalography responses from 50 subjects to 1,854 object concepts and 22,248 images in the THINGS stimulus set, a manually curated and high-quality image database that was specifically designed for studying human vision. The THINGS-EEG dataset provides neuroimaging recordings to a systematic collection of objects and concepts and can therefore support a wide array of research to understand visual object processing in the human brain.

neuroscience↗