Recent advancements in computational pathology have greatly improved automated histopathological analysis. A compelling question in the field is how morphological traits are associated with genetic characteristics or molecular phenotypes. Here we propose TEMI, a novel framework for molecular subtype classification of cancers using whole-slide images (WSIs), augmented with transcriptomic data during training. TEMI aims to extract molecular-level signals from WSIs and make efficient use of available multimodal data. To this end, TEMI introduces a patch fusion network that captures dependencies among local patches of gigapixel WSIs to produce global representations and aligns them with transcriptomic embeddings attained from a masked transcriptomic autoencoder. TEMI achieves superior performance compared with existing methods in molecular subtype classification, owing to its effective integration of transcriptomic information achieved by the two developed alignment strategies. Guided by discriminative transcriptomic data, TEMI learns invariant WSI representations, while morphological features also enhance gene expression prediction. These findings suggest that histological features encode latent molecular signals, highlighting the interplay between the tumor microenvironment and cancer transcriptomics. Our study demonstrates how multimodal learning can bridge morphology and molecular biology, providing an effective tool to advance precision medicine.

SUMMARY: The CRISPR/Cas System has been shown to be an efficient and accurate genome-editing technique. There exist a number of tools to design the guide RNA sequences and predict potential off-target sites. However, most of the existing computational tools on gRNA design are restricted to small deletions. To address this issue, we present pgRNAFinder, with an easy-to-use web interface, which enables researchers to design single or distance-free paired-gRNA sequences. The web interface of pgRNAFinder contains both gRNA search and scoring system. After users input query sequences, it searches gRNA by 3' protospacer-adjacent motif (PAM), and possible off-targets, and scores the conservation of the deleted sequences rapidly. Filters can be applied to identify high-quality CRISPR sites. PgRNAFinder offers gRNA design functionality for 8 vertebrate genomes. Furthermore, to keep pgRNAFinder open, extensible to any organism, we provide the source package for local use. AVAILABILITY AND IMPLEMENTATION: The pgRNAFinder is freely available at http://songyanglab.sysu.edu.cn/wangwebs/pgRNAFinder/, and the source code and user manual can be obtained from https://github.com/xiexiaowei/pgRNAFinder. CONTACT: [email protected] or [email protected]. SUPPLEMENTARY INFORMATION: Supplementary data are available at Bioinformatics online.