Vibe genes? Natural(ish) language comes to protein, genome design software

Researchers in China developed Pinal, a protein design tool that takes natural-language prompts and uses a text-to-structure module (T2struct) plus SAProt-T to generate amino acid sequences, though only one of 29 tested GFP-like designs fluoresced. Separately, Hugging Face, the Zhongguancun Academy, and the University of Naples "Federico II" introduced Carbon X, an open-weight model retrained from Qwen3-14B on DNA that can translate between DNA and English and run locally. The article notes that testing designs still requires specialized lab work and that Carbon X can struggle with specific positions and hallucinate on vague prompts.