A professor at the Indiana Univesity Luddy School of Informatics, Computing and Engineering has co-authored a paper in Cell detailing a decade-long effort to develop PhysiCell, a powerful open-source cancer modeling tool that democratizes biological simulation by allowing researchers to run complex virtual tissue experiments without writing code.

The amount of each of the more than a thousand different glycoproteins in your blood varies widely with the 10 most abundant glycoproteins accounting for 90 percent of the total mass. Finding a protein that isn’t in this top 10 is a bit like looking for Waldo if only one rendition of the character remained in a collection of every “Where’s Waldo” comic ever produced.

Scientists at Sanford Burnham Prebys and colleagues at Scripps Research Institute published findings July 7, 2025, in Nature Communications demonstrating a strategy for identifying less-abundant proteins that bind with a specific type of receptor termed an endocytic lectin, and namely the mannose receptor Mrc1. This approach enabled the research team to uncover hundreds of binding partners that together predicted Mrc1’s roles in our health.