Active culture
Inoculum · MMXXVI
Boston, Massachusetts

Inoculum

Boston, Massachusetts · est. MMXXVI

A collective of bioscience researchers producing expert reasoning for frontier AI.

Built by graduate students and postdocs working at the bench in Boston.

Plate A · 0 colonies
click to inoculate
i.
What we do
Fig. 01

The hardest reasoning in biology lives in people, not in papers.

Frontier AI models are trained on textbooks and abstracts, but the actual work of a graduate scientist happens in the margin: catching a missing control, recognizing why a mechanism cannot be what the model claims, knowing the trick that exists nowhere because it was passed down at the bench.

Inoculum gathers that reasoning. We are graduate students and postdocs running real experiments in Boston, producing careful and verifiable expert work in molecular biology, biochemistry, structural biology, and adjacent fields.

The expertise already exists. It has just never been written down.

ii.
Where models fall short
Fig. 02 · Dilution series

The capability gap is specific, and it is mostly about care.

100
Multi-step quantitative reasoning with unit tracking Stoichiometry, kinetics, dosing problems where confident answers drift by orders of magnitude.
Tier I
10-1
Mechanism reasoning under structural constraints Proposed interactions that violate geometry, fabricated contacts, residues that cannot reach.
Tier I
10-2
Reading primary literature critically Missing controls, unsupported conclusions, the gel that tells a different story than the figure legend.
Tier II
10-3
Experimental design under realistic constraints Reagents that do not exist, timelines that are not possible, controls that any second-year would catch.
Tier II
iii.
Correspondence
Fig. 03

If you are a researcher who wants to contribute.

hello@inoculum.bio
Inquiry types

Graduate students and postdocs interested in contributing.
Research groups looking to source expert reasoning.
Journalists and collaborators.