How location sharing apps change the ways we communicate

University of Illinois College of Agricultural, Consumer and Environmental Sciences

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URBANA, Ill. – Mobile apps that allow people to share their location with others have become increasingly popular. But how and why do we use these apps, and what are the implications for interpersonal communication? That’s the topic of a new study from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign.

“I was teaching a class on relationship development to undergraduate students, and I made a comment about location sharing. They all got very animated, sharing experiences and asking questions about use cases. I realized there was very little research about this topic, so I decided to conduct a study,” said lead author Brian Ogolsky, professor in the Department of Human Development and Family Studies at U. of I.

“I believe knowing how people use these technologies helps us to understand the scripts and the processes that underpin relationships, how they are changing, and what that means for how we relate to each other.”

Ogolsky and his colleagues conducted an online survey with individuals across the U.S. and the U.K., asking them to describe their location sharing practices.  

Respondents on average shared their location with 3.86 people, with a span ranging from 1 to 83. The majority reported using the Find My app for iPhone, followed by Google Maps, Life360, Snapchat, and WhatsApp.

People most often shared their location with their romantic partner, then friends, siblings, parents, children, other family members, and roommates.

The researchers organized the reasons people were sharing their location into four main categories: safety, practicality, casual use, and relationship processes.

Safety was the main reason for sharing location with immediate family, parents, and children.

“Respondents said it helps them feel safer knowing where someone is. That’s unsurprising; however, it’s really an illusion of safety. Knowing where my partner is 50 miles from here does not mean I can help them in a pinch, or that I can get somebody to help them. It may be more about peace of mind than actual safety,” Ogolsky said.  

For romantic partners and friends, practicality was the most common reason for sharing. That included convenience and planning, such as what time to make dinner, or coordinating who picks up the kids. Respondents also mentioned keeping track of people who are traveling, or interacting with others who live or work in different places.  

Casual use included sharing location for fun and novelty. Some respondents said it seemed interesting or entertaining, and there was no specific intent. For example, they would share location with everyone in their friend group and then forget about it.

Finally, the researchers identified relationship processes as a separate category, indicating usage specifically intended to maintain, support, and manage a relationship. This could be about trust, honesty, and open communication. A few people also mentioned pressure or expectations from their partner or family members about their roles and responsibilities.

Ogolsky pointed out there are potential drawbacks when technology replaces human interaction.

“Our findings highlight we’re heading towards a world where technological changes will dictate how and when we communicate. Location sharing is moving from primarily safety-related causes into the relationship realm, where it alters communication,” he said.

“You can check where someone is and decide you don’t want to bother them, so you don’t call or text. It takes away the ability of the person to say whether they would like to talk right now, and removes interpersonal negotiation.”

People come to depend on technology; for example, if you plan to meet someone at a concert and your phone dies, you may not be able to find each other. Location sharing with friend groups can also create a sense of FOMO, the fear of missing out, if you notice other people getting together without you.

Giving others access to your location also raises privacy concerns. However, this appears to be less important to younger generations who have grown up in a world where they have been surveilled by tech companies since they were born. Their idea of what should be private information is fundamentally different than older generations, Ogolsky noted.

There are also implications regarding whether location sharing information can be used as evidence in criminal court cases, and it can be misused in abusive relationships.

Ultimately, most people adopt a new technology because they think it's going to make their lives easier.

“There is something to be said for streamlining the minutia of relationships. A lot of people do not like planning; they do not like waiting. With location sharing, they can get information about others without intruding, they can be where they need to be at the right times. If they can squeeze in one more thing, that can be a real benefit for some people,” Ogolsky concluded.

The study, “Near, Far, Wherever You Are: With Whom and Why Do People Use Location Sharing in Relationships,” is published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships  [DOI: 10.1177/02654075261446344]. This research was supported by Hatch funding from USDA’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture. 

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Journal

Journal of Social and Personal Relationships

DOI

10.1177/02654075261446344 

Article Title

Near, Far, Wherever You Are: With Whom and Why Do People Use Location Sharing in Relationships

Sustainable Mobility Center aims to transform how the world moves

The Precourt Institute for Energy at the Doerr School of Sustainability has launched a cross-campus initiative to fundamentally rethink how people and goods move across land, sea, and air.

Stanford University

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The new Center for Sustainability Research will seek to make transportation of people and goods over land, air, and sea more sustainable, as well as to make interconnected mobility systems more efficient and less expensive.

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Credit: Courtesy Center for Automotive Research at Stanford

When you drive a conventional car, only 1% of the gasoline burned gets you from point A to point B. Almost all the fuel’s energy just generates wasted heat and propels your two-ton vehicle down the road. That $5 a gallon gasoline delivered less than a nickel’s worth of value.

Surely, we can do better.

The Precourt Institute for Energy at the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability has launched the Sustainable Mobility Center to fundamentally rethink how people and goods move across land, sea, and air – systems that mostly operate as they did decades ago. This new center aims to make mobility systems more sustainable in the broad sense of the word: environmentally responsible, affordable, reliable, safe, and fair, with solutions that can scale worldwide.

“Transportation is the backbone of the global economy, but also one of its most difficult sectors to transform,” said Marco Pavone, faculty co-director of the Sustainable Mobility Center with Ram Rajagopal. “The center is designed to combine Stanford’s strengths – from energy systems to AI and autonomy – with industry and government collaboration to accelerate real-world solutions at scale.”

Systems-level approach

The global transportation system incorporates vehicles, infrastructure, energy networks, operations, public policies, and human behavior. Making this system broadly sustainable demands a coordinated redesign, according to the new program’s leaders.

An example of overlapping challenges: While electric vehicles do not produce local pollution, most are charged by electric grids that rely on fossil fuel power plants that pollute neighboring communities and drive climate change. Relatedly, how will growing adoption of EVs affect the stability of electricity grids? More broadly, how will public and private transportation of people, as well as the movement of goods over land, air, and sea, work together to improve efficiency, speed, cost, and other goals?

“We are not simply transitioning from one energy source to another,” said Rajagopal, associate professor in Civil & Environmental Engineering, a joint department of the Stanford Doerr School of Sustainability and the School of Engineering. “We are rethinking how mobility systems are designed, optimized, and experienced by leveraging new transportation technologies and advances in AI, autonomy, digital infrastructure, smart grids, and data-driven decision-making.”

Bridging research and impact

The Sustainable Mobility Center’s leadership team understands how foundational research, technology development, the digital economy, and real-world deployment work together, and how more sustainable transportation can help make communities and cities cleaner and healthier for generations to come.

William Chueh, who is the faculty director of Stanford’s Precourt Institute for Energy, is a leader in energy science and technology and an entrepreneur. Rajagopal is an expert in power systems and the integration of renewables, smart distribution systems, and demand-side data analytics. He also directs Stanford’s smart grid initiative, Bits & Watts, which has funded extensive research on preparing electric grids for high penetration of electric vehicles. Rajagopal is co-founder and chief technology officer of a software startup for managing higher electricity demand on electricity grids.

Pavone is an associate professor of aeronautics and astronautics at Stanford’s School of Engineering and leads autonomous vehicle research at NVIDIA. His research centers on physical AI, with applications including self-driving cars, autonomous aerospace vehicles, and general-purpose robotic systems. Pavone directed the Center for Automotive Research at Stanford, a long-standing program that shaped the evolution of autonomous vehicle technology and was the forerunner to the Sustainable Mobility Center.

“AI and autonomy are not separate from sustainability. They are central to it,” said Pavone. “They allow us to operate mobility systems with a level of efficiency, safety, and coordination that simply wasn’t possible before.”

Twenty Stanford faculty members across five schools have affiliated themselves with the center.

The Sustainable Mobility Center’s activities will be funded by corporations through two mechanisms: member fees paid to an industrial affiliates program and research sponsored by individual companies. Membership fees are pooled to fund the new center’s research, educational, and other efforts.

While affiliate members can advise center leadership on research initiatives, the faculty directors decide the topics for proposal requests and select Stanford research projects to fund through a competitive process. The center and the Precourt Institute will help members sponsor research by connecting them with Stanford faculty who share their academic interests. Stanford’s Office of Research Administration oversees sponsored research projects.

“As throughout the campus, industry engagement is essential to ensure that our research is grounded in real-world challenges and constraints,” said Ryan Chin, the center’s managing director.

“We will work with our academic and business affiliates to develop solutions that are technically rigorous and practically deployable,” added Chin, who is co-founder and former CEO of an autonomous vehicle company spun out of MIT, where he earned his doctorate.

The six founding industry supporters are International Motors, LLC, Mitsui O.S.K. Lines, Prologis, Rivian, Shell, and Yazaki North America.

Research focus and structure

To accelerate progress, the Sustainable Mobility Center will convene stakeholders around a set of global, persistent, and complex challenges. “These ‘Grand Challenges’ include zero-emission freight, sustainable aviation fuels, intelligent logistics systems, multi-modal transportation networks, and resilient infrastructure,” said associate director Eylül Bilgin, PhD ’23 in aeronautics and astronautics.

To enable solutions for Grand Challenges, the Sustainable Mobility Center’s work has been organized around five pillars. Each pillar enables in-depth technical development while also serving as a building block for integrated solutions that align with Grand Challenge opportunities. For example, to develop zero-emission freight at global scale, new vehicle technology, intelligent infrastructure, safety systems, and sensible policies and economics must all work together to unlock grand challenge opportunities.

The center’s five core pillars are:

• Energy systems: Advancing electrification, sustainable fuels (in partnership with the Precourt Institute’s Center for Fuels of the Future), and deep integration with energy infrastructure – including grid resilience, smart charging, and vehicle-to-grid systems.
• Infrastructure: Designing next-generation physical and digital infrastructure, from charging and fueling networks to connected, data-enabled transportation systems.
• Economics and policy: Aligning incentives, markets, and regulatory frameworks to enable adoption, scale, and access to sustainable mobility solutions for everyone.
• Safety: Ensuring secure, reliable, and trustworthy mobility systems, particularly as autonomy and AI-driven decision-making become more prevalent.
• Interdisciplinary design: Reimagining mobility through human-centered and systems-level approaches that integrate engineering, urban design, and behavioral science.

Invited leaders from academia, industry, and government will participate in the center’s inaugural meeting at Stanford on May 21. Participants will primarily work to define the scope and priorities of the program’s initial Grand Challenges, as well as opportunities for additional companies to engage in the work.

“The world needs new models for mobility, ones that are sustainable, affordable, secure, and deeply integrated with the technologies shaping our future,” said Chueh. “Stanford’s Sustainable Mobility Center is positioned to substantially define that future.”

 

A physicist’s fresh look at the ‘prisoner’s dilemma’ reveals hope for cooperation

A Rutgers-led study offers a hopeful twist on a classic game theory problem

Rutgers University

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The “prisoner’s dilemma” is one of the most famous ideas in game theory. It even appeared in the Oscar-winning film A Beautiful Mind, which told the story of mathematician John Nash.

For decades, this game has been used to explain why selfishness often beats cooperation.

In the prisoner’s dilemma, two players can either cooperate or cheat. Cheating always seems to pay off more, so both players end up cheating and losing out even though working together would have given them the biggest reward.

Scientists have long used this idea to understand everything from microbes sharing resources to human societies negotiating peace. The takeaway message? In the evolutionary race, cheaters win.

A new study led by Rutgers physicist Alexandre Morozov turns that assumption upside down. His research, published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, shows that cooperation can emerge naturally without special rules or genetic ties.

“The prisoner’s dilemma has told us for 75 years that cheaters always take over in the long run,” said Morozov, a professor in the Department of Physics and Astronomy at the Rutgers School of Arts and Sciences. “The end point of any society, based on this, is complete breakdown. But that’s not at all the case. Even in a very simple scenario, cheaters don’t always win. In fact, it’s easier for cooperation to rise.”

Morozov and his collaborator, Alexander Feigel of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem, discovered that the key to cooperation is keeping track of your opponents. If individuals can recognize others, cooperation starts to flourish.

“All you have to do is remember who you interacted with and react in the same way,” said Morozov, who is also director of the Rutgers Center for Quantitative Biology. “That’s enough for cooperation to emerge by itself in many scenarios. It’s what physicists call an emergent property.”

This finding is striking because previous theories required extra conditions such as helping relatives or sticking with your group. Morozov’s model works without those assumptions. It suggests that, even in simple organisms such as microbes or insects, cooperation can evolve if these organisms are able to tell each other apart, perhaps through chemical signals or physical traits.

Game theory underpins this research. A game, in the mathematical sense, is a situation in which players make rational decisions according to defined rules to receive some sort of payoff. Game theory is the branch of mathematics that studies these interactions and helps explain why strategies such as cooperation or cheating emerge in nature and society.

Cooperation is the foundation of complex life, Morozov said. Without it, cells wouldn’t form tissues and societies wouldn’t exist. Yet Darwinian evolution seems to favor selfishness. Morozov’s work offers a new way of understanding how life overcame that hurdle.

“Evolution likes shaping things over long periods of time if it has some material to work with,” Morozov said. “If cooperation always dies off, there’s nothing to evolve. But if there’s a chance, evolution will refine it and make it more stable.”

The implications go beyond biology. Morozov said that his model shows periods of stability interrupted by upheaval, patterns that might sound familiar in human history.

“Cheaters don’t always win,” he said. “Cooperation can persist, and it does persist in many systems scientists look at, such as multi-cellular organisms in which individual cells have to cooperate to survive.”

Morozov started his career as a physicist focusing on protein folding and statistical mechanics, which deals with predicting the behavior of complex systems. Later, he realized those same mathematical tools could help explain how living things evolve. For years, he has explored evolutionary dynamics, building models that show how traits spread in populations under evolutionary forces such as mutation and natural selection.

That experience, Morozov said, gave him the foundation for his latest work. When he encountered game theory during a sabbatical at the Hebrew University, he saw a connection. The same methods he used to study molecules and genes, he realized, could also reveal why cooperation, rather than selfishness, sometimes wins in the prisoner’s dilemma.

The team used mathematical models and computer simulations, including populations of neural networks playing repeated games. A neural network is a computer system modeled after the human brain that teaches patterns and makes predictions by processing information through layers of interconnected nodes.

The scientists also produced a new theoretical result, a generalization of a classic evolutionary principle called Fisher’s fundamental theorem of natural selection.

Morozov said he hopes the work will spark new research on how cooperation evolves in nature and maybe even inspire fresh thinking about cooperation in human societies.

Explore more of the ways Rutgers research is shaping the future.

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Journal

Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences

DOI

10.1073/pnas.2513282123 

Article Title

Emergence of cooperation due to opponent-specific responses in Prisoner's Dilemma

Article Publication Date

22-May-2026

Busseiron and the formation of a discipline in Japanese physics

University of Chicago Press Journals

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The middle of the twentieth century was a period of significant scientific advancement, particularly in the realm of physics. Within this rapidly changing landscape, academic disciplines emerged and evolved to keep pace with scientific discoveries. The new subdiscipline of solid-state physics gained prominence in the United States, but it was later subsumed by the broader category of condensed matter physics. In Japan, however, physics research since the 1940s has included a unique branch called Busseiron—a discipline concerning the study of matter that has no direct English equivalent but that has remained in use nonetheless. A new article by Hiroto Kono in Isis: A Journal of the History of Science Society explores the historical formation of Busseiron and how it was shaped by its specific national context.

The article presents a history of Busseiron as an evolving concept: the word Busseiron was initially used in a pedagogical context in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, but by World War II, the landscape of Japanese physics had expanded greatly and Busseiron came to describe a cluster of research areas. These included magnetism, metal physics, and the emerging field of quantum theory. In a 1942 article, a physicist named Hidetosi Takahasi positioned Busseiron as a counterpart to Soryûshiron (the theory of elementary particles)—a distinction that would continue to shape discourse around the discipline and its boundaries.

Kono describes how Busseiron became more organized throughout the 1940s, with the establishment of several colloquia and a new journal (Busseiron Kenkyû). The field continued to broaden in scope, incorporating new topics such as polymers and low temperatures. This expansion, in part, reflected scientific advances related to wartime technologies. In contrast to the division between academia and engineering that characterized the physics landscape in the United States, Japanese physicists saw Busseiron as a field that bridged the gap between these two spheres.

In the article, Kono surveys various textbooks and other publications from this period that mention Busseiron and finds that a diversity of topics fell within the scope of the field. In fact, by the late 1940s the term Busseiron had become an “umbrella discipline” that incorporated a variety of new and existing topics related to matter. Despite a lack of consensus on what exactly should be included, the dichotomy between Busseiron and Soryûshiron (sometimes characterized as a rivalry) was widely referenced in attempts to classify the field. By the end of the 1940s, the founders of the original Busseiron discipline attempted to corral the expansion of the term by replacing it with the label “chemical physics”—a field growing in popularity overseas. This attempt was largely a failure, as Busseiron already had a foothold in the scientific community and the term was widely accepted. Its definition expanded even further by 1950, with a scope encompassing “almost any research that dealt with matter.”

Kono describes various debates over Busseiron’s structure that arose within the Japanese scientific community in the 1950s and argues that the lack of consistency in defining the term was partly what allowed it to endure into the present day. The name had firmly lodged itself in physicists’ nomenclature and the contentious discussion around it only served to further legitimize its status. As Kono states in the article’s conclusion, “names matter and deserve greater attention in the disciplinary and transnational histories of science.” By tracing discourse around the name Busseiron, this article explores how the Japanese cultural context influenced the genesis of a unique field.

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Since its inception in 1912, Isis has featured scholarly articles, research notes, and commentary on the history of science, medicine, and technology and their cultural influences. Review essays and book reviews on new contributions to the discipline are also included. An official publication of the History of Science Society, Isis is the oldest English-language journal in the field.  

Founded in 1924, the History of Science Society is the world’s largest society dedicated to understanding science, technology, medicine, and their interactions with society in historical context.

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Journal

Isis

DOI

10.1086/740958 

Article Title

Coining a Discipline: The Formation and Perpetuation of a Japanese Branch of Physics of Matter

 

Prior authorization rules vary widely among major commercial insurers

American College of Physicians

          

Below please find summaries of new articles that will be published in the next issue of Annals of Internal Medicine. The summaries are not intended to substitute for the full articles as a source of information. This information is under strict embargo and by taking it into possession, media representatives are committing to the terms of the embargo not only on their own behalf, but also on behalf of the organization they represent.   
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1. Prior authorization rules vary widely among major commercial insurers

Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-05289

URL goes live when the embargo lifts             

A brief research report reviewed the prior authorization rules for Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealthcare and found little consistency in their prior authorization rules. The findings highlight a fragmented system that may contribute to administrative burden for clinicians and confusion for patients. The report is published in Annals of Internal Medicine.

 

As part of a research program on the potential benefit of standardizing health care contracts, researchers from Stanford University and colleagues examined how prior authorization rules vary across commercial insurers and whether those rules could be organized into a single, searchable database like the ICD-10 system. They analyzed publicly available provider manuals from Aetna, Humana, and UnitedHealthcare, reviewing thousands of procedure and service codes to determine when prior authorization was required and what information clinicians had to submit to the insurer to obtain authorization for a particular test or treatment. Using a combination of automated review and manual checks, they built a searchable database and used it to compare insurer rules. They found that while all three insurers required prior authorization for some services, the majority of services required prior authorization from only one of the three insurers, and the criteria and documentation requirements differed widely. The authors conclude that assembling these rules into a shared database is feasible and could improve transparency for both patients and clinicians, but the unexplained differences across insurers warrant further research on the appropriateness of this administrative barrier to patient receipt of some interventions ordered by their clinician.

 

Media contacts: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Gabby Macrina at gmacrina@acponline.org. To contact corresponding author David Scheinker, PhD please email Errol Ozdalga at eozdalga@stanford.edu and Kara Clemins at kclemins@stanford.edu.

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2. ACP calls for reform of the Medicare Advantage Program to protect patient health

Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-04309

URL goes live when the embargo lifts             

The Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS) should reform Medicare Advantage to protect patient health and realign the plan option with its original purpose, says the American College of Physicians (ACP). In a new paper, “Protecting the Integrity and Quality of the Medicare Advantage Program: A Position Paper from the American College of Physicians” published in Annals of Internal Medicine, ACP examines growth of the Medicare Advantage program and its implications for the delivery of fair, high-quality and fiscally responsible care to older adults and people with disabilities.

 

Medicare Advantage is the private option in Medicare that now enrolls more than half of all Medicare beneficiaries. The plans are offered by private insurers approved by the CMS and integrate Part A and Part B of traditional Medicare coverage into a single plan with additional coverage options, such as prescription drugs, dental, vision and even gym memberships. The additional coverage appeals to beneficiaries, but beneficiaries often face challenges in navigating plan choices, unexpected costs, prior authorization and access to clinicians and post-acute services. These barriers disproportionately affect those who are low-income, live in rural communities, or have several chronic conditions. Medicare Advantage risk adjustment policies have created payment vulnerabilities and favorable patient selection, whereas quality measurement of the plans remains fragmented and overly complex.

 

In the paper, ACP details several position statements and recommendations for policymakers to ensure that traditional fee-for-service Medicare remains a strong, sustainable option for beneficiaries and advises that Medicare Advantage plans should not be used to replace or privatize traditional Medicare. These plans also must provide transparent, standardized benefit designs, which would improve beneficiaries' decision making, enhance accountability and ensure that plan offerings prioritize meaningful health benefits rather than serving as an incentive to select a plan. The transparency should extend to the promotion of Medicare Advantage plans, as well. ACP strongly advises robust oversight and regulation of Medicare Advantage marketing practices to prevent misleading advertisements and says that plans engaging in deceptive marketing should face penalties. Medicare Advantage plans should also be required to provide clear, standardized cost disclosures to protect beneficiaries from unexpected financial strain, and CMS should ensure that Medicare Advantage plans prioritize affordability alongside access to care. ACP says the plans should enact balanced and transparent risk adjustment mechanisms to better reflect patient complexity and avoid excessive coding practices.

 

Prior authorization requirements in Medicare Advantage plans are a common concern for physicians and patients due to administrative burden and potential delays in necessary care; ACP calls for streamlined prior authorization processes with faster response times and improved transparency. ACP also recommends that Medicare Advantage plans offer comprehensive and accessible telehealth options to benefit rural and underserved populations. The plans should also report to CMS and the public on the usage and outcomes of supplemental benefits, such as telehealth, dental, vision and hearing services to ensure accountability. Finally, ACP urges policymakers to prevent restrictive contractual clauses in Medicare Advantage models that interfere with physicians’ abilities to serve their patients. Regulatory frameworks should prioritize patient-centered care over administrative or financial considerations.

 

Media contacts: For an embargoed PDF, please contact Gabby Macrina at gmacrina@acponline.org. To speak with someone at ACP, please email Jacquelyn Blaser at jblaser@acponline.org.

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Also new this issue:

How Big Is the “Gray Area”? Navigating Health-Threatening Previability Pregnancy Complications in States With Abortion Restrictions

Alyssa Bilinski, PhD, et al.

Ideas and Opinions

Abstract: https://www.acpjournals.org/doi/10.7326/ANNALS-25-02397  

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Journal

Annals of Internal Medicine

DOI

10.7326/ANNALS-25-05289 

Method of Research

News article

Subject of Research

People

Article Title

Variation in Commercial Insurer Prior Authorization Rules

Article Publication Date

19-May-2026

 

Protein engineering and testing condensed to a single day

Stanford University

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Proteins are critical to life – and to industry. There are countless proteins that could be engineered to treat and even cure serious diseases and cellular dysfunctions. Industrial applications are similarly promising, with proteins increasingly used as enzymes in food manufacturing and in consumer detergents.

While AI can help suggest improvements, each novel protein must still be created in the real world and tested for performance. It is a labor-intensive process that involves constructing the DNA instructions for each protein in yeast or bacteria and growing individual clones for protein production and testing. This can take many days for a single protein of interest and even longer if the protein needs to be tested in mammalian cells, a process that requires retrieving DNA from microbes for transfer to the mammalian cells.

In a new paper, Michael Z. Lin, a professor of neurobiology and of bioengineering in the schools of Engineering and Medicine, and graduate students, Yan Wu in bioengineering and Pengli Wang* in chemical engineering, say they have condensed the time-intensive protein building and testing process to just 24 hours. They call their approach MIDAS for Microbe-Independent Deep Assembly and Screening. MIDAS could rapidly accelerate biological research in fields stretching from oncology to environmental sciences. The study introducing MIDAS appears in the journal Molecular Systems Biology.

“The fundamental questions of molecular biology remain: how do we make better proteins and how do we understand what makes a protein work?” Lin says. “Doing that work takes valuable time and resources, but we’ve found a way to dramatically reduce those demands.”

Going in circles

Lin and colleagues leapfrogged the traditional microbial assembly process by using a genetic replication technique known as polymerase chain reaction (PCR). PCR can amplify linear segments of DNA into millions or billions of copies very quickly. By using PCR to build entire genes used by mammalian cells to express a given protein, they bypassed the need for microbial cloning and DNA transfer. The PCR-produced gene variations can be directly transferred into mammalian cells for functional analysis. The only requirement for the PCR procedure is short strings of DNA known as “primers” that can be ordered for next-day delivery.

“With MIDAS, we can receive PCR primers in the morning, assemble the necessary genes by mid-day, and by late afternoon transfer the genes into cells to observe how the proteins function,” says co-first author Yan Wu. “And we can do this all for hundreds or thousands of protein variants in parallel at a time.”

In traditional protein engineering, when researchers identify a promising variant, they have to assemble and clone the gene expressing the protein into a circular genetic structure known as a plasmid. They must then transfer the modified plasmids into the DNA of bacteria or yeast to produce suitable quantities of each unique plasmid DNA, which must then be transferred into mammalian cells for validation.

This clone-and-transfer process is laborious, slow, and expensive, and it greatly restricts the number of variants that can feasibly be evaluated. MIDAS changes that calculus. Lin and team’s key insight was to do away with the circular plasmids, which are incompatible with PCR. Instead, they treat DNA as linear information that is ideally suited to PCR. This allows them to assemble hundreds of gene variants at a time and directly transfer them into mammalian cells in quantity to identify the best performers quickly and cost-effectively.

With MIDAS, we can receive PCR primers in the morning, assemble the necessary genes by mid-day, and by late afternoon transfer the genes into cells.

Yan Wu

“We decided there’s nothing magical about the circular structure of plasmids,” Lin says. “For PCR, you just need the genetic data. That was the moment of inspiration.”

A practical test of 384 variants using MIDAS took about four hours of hands-on lab work and about $2,000 in reagents. By existing methods, an experienced researcher would need approximately 192 hours and about $20,000 in reagents to evaluate just 24 variants. The researchers calculate that MIDAS is almost 50-times faster and a tenth the cost of cloning-based approaches.

Immediate impact

MIDAS could have immediate real-world implications for biological research. First, it should accelerate important enzyme and biosensor studies, the researchers say. Second, it could improve the automatic production of PCR primers that are ideally suited to modern liquid-handling robots, which can evaluate hundreds of new proteins at a time. Last, and perhaps most importantly, they believe MIDAS could drive better and bigger sequence-fitness datasets that could improve data-intensive AI training, leading to ever more powerful molecular design models.

“We used MIDAS not only to find the best-performing version of a protein but also to understand how well closely related variants work, which is information we can use to train AI models,” says co-first author Pengli Wang. “MIDAS is so easy that we can use it to create large data sets very quickly.”

Looking forward, Lin believes MIDAS could yield deeper combinatorial searches, tighter integration with robotics, and the generation of gene sequence-molecular fitness maps to feed improved machine-learning models that can fuel computational design and experimental validation.

“MIDAS is at least an order-of-magnitude faster at real-world validation,” Lin says. “It compresses the engineering design-build-test cycle for proteins to just a couple of days, and we think it could drive rapid advances in AI-inspired molecular biology.”

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For more information

Contributing authors include Lan Xiang Liu and Daesun Song of Stanford University; and authors from Fudan University, Shanghai, China; and the Promega Corporation. Lin is also a member of Stanford Bio-X, the Cardiovascular Institute, the Maternal & Child Health Research Institute, theStanford Cancer Institute, and the Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute, and a faculty fellow of Sarafan ChEM-H.

Funding for MIDAS was provided by NIH, a Stanford Bio-X Interdisciplinary Initiatives Program Seed Grant, a Stanford Bio-X PhD Fellowship, and a Stanford Wu Tsai Neurosciences Institute Interdisciplinary Graduate Fellowship.

*Pengli Wang passed away in May 2026 after this research was completed. He was a fourth-year PhD student in chemical engineering.

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Journal

Molecular Systems Biology

DOI

10.1038/s44320-026-00210-z 

Article Title

Fast analysis and engineering of protein function by microbe-independent deep assembly and screening