Autonomous wet-lab experimentation requires more than plausible protocol text: biological intent, quantitative procedures, device constraints and experimental feedback must remain aligned from protocol and SOP design to code and physical execution. We developed ProtoPilot, a self-evolving multi-agent system, together with an expert-grounded benchmark and evaluation framework for testing this conversion as an experimental automation problem. The framework spans 294 synthetic-biology and molecular-biology tasks derived from 98 gold-standard protocols, wet-lab expert rubrics, device-level validity gates and real experimental tests. ProtoPilot incorporates layer-wise verifiability, multi-agent orchestration and a runtime-updated skill library to generate protocols, expand SOPs, synthesize SDK-compliant code and revise workflows from wet-lab feedback. It achieved a Top@3 expert-preference rate of 90.2%, an overall protocol-to-code gate pass rate of 89.5% and an Opentrons pass rate of 88.24%, compared with 32.35% for OpenTrons-AI. Wet-lab validation produced interpretable readouts, Sanger-confirmed products and feedback-corrected PCA-assembled DNA targets, establishing a verifiable route to autonomous experimentation. Together, these results show that the evaluation framework captures execution-relevant requirements for autonomous wet-lab automation, and that ProtoPilot can meet them by converting protocol and code generation into validated execution and feedback-guided revision.
Yankai Jiang, Wei Tang, Haoran Sun et al.· arXiv.org· 0 citations
Structure-property relationships are foundational to biology, chemistry and materials science, where function, reactivity and physical response emerge from spatial, chemical and periodic organization. Mechanistically explaining these relationships requires interpreting structural evidence through scientific principles and physical constraints, from stereochemistry and bonding to symmetry, energetics and periodic order. However, applying artificial intelligence to this process presents a joint challenge of representation and reasoning: models must preserve domain-native structural information while showing how specific evidence supports predictions under these constraints. Here we introduce SciReasoner, a multimodal scientific foundation model for native structural reasoning across proteins, small molecules and inorganic crystals. SciReasoner discretizes coordinates, topologies and periodic connectivities into a unified structure-aware vocabulary, treating structural tokens as addressable evidence units during reasoning. In homology-controlled Gene Ontology prediction, SciReasoner improves Cellular Component annotation for low-homology and orphan-like proteins, increasing $F_{\max}$ from 0.42 to 0.55. In chemistry, it raises single-step retrosynthesis accuracy from 0.63 to 0.72 while generating fragment-level disconnection and precursor-verification traces. In materials science, its representations separate elemental and compound phases and resolve high- and low-band-gap regimes. Across 86 benchmarks, SciReasoner achieves state-of-the-art performance on 67 tasks. Double-blind expert evaluation rates its reasoning traces as preferred or at least comparable to those of a frontier large language model in 98% of cases. By making structure an inspectable substrate for reasoning under scientific constraints, SciReasoner connects accurate prediction with interpretable scientific inference.
Chen Tang, Yizhou Wang, Jianyu Wu et al.· 1 citation