MIT and the Whitehead Institute research team have decoded the language of intercellular communication using a machine learning model called IRIS.

Professor Pulin Li's team at MIT, along with graduate student Nicholas Hutchins, discovered that each signaling pathway leaves a consistent gene activity fingerprint across cell types. Leveraging this finding, they developed the IRIS machine learning model to trace signals received by embryonic cells throughout development. The paper was published in Nature Methods on September 8.