Can online consultations with biology experts really replace the 'old pros' in the lab?

In today's fast-paced world of life sciences and biotechnology, protein research is becoming a core driver of innovation in medicine, food, materials, and more. However, a long-standing problem for researchers is: when faced with specialized challenges, where can you quickly find a real bio expert who knows their stuff?

Traditionally, if company researchers want guidance from authoritative experts, they often have to go through lengthy coordination—contacting university professors, looking for industry consultants, booking consultation times… the whole process can take weeks or even months. For small and medium-sized research teams and individual researchers, the barrier to accessing expert resources is even higher.

1. The "expert gap" in biological research 

 The skills gap among biotechnology R&D specialists

Protein design is a highly complex systems engineering process. From sequence design to structure prediction, from function optimization to experimental validation, every step requires deep expertise and extensive practical experience. However, in reality, expert resources are very unevenly distributed:

- Top experts are concentrated in a few research institutions and large companies, making it hard for small and medium teams to access them

- The expert consultation process is lengthy; it often takes weeks from first contact to formal communication

- Consultation costs are high, which can be a significant burden for early-stage R&D projects

- Communication efficiency is low; a single consultation usually can't cover the ongoing needs across the entire R&D process

These pain points cause many R&D projects to get stuck at critical points, and innovative ideas can't quickly turn into actual results.

2. What does "online consultation with biological experts" solve?

Online consultation with biological experts isn't just a simple Q&A. It uses internet collaboration platforms to remotely inject expertise from specialized areas like structural biology, computational biology, protein engineering, and cell biology into users' R&D projects in a standardized, efficient, and traceable manner.

Currently, a mature online consultation system for biological experts typically covers:

- Evaluation and optimization of experimental feasibility

- Designing protein/antibody engineering modification strategies

- Sequence analysis, structure prediction, and rational mutant library design

- Troubleshooting expression, purification, stability, and solubility issues

- Interpreting data from wet and dry experiments and providing iterative suggestions

Compared with traditional offline consulting, online consultation breaks geographic barriers, compresses expert response time from "weeks" to "hours", and preserves communication records on a digital platform, making every round of intellectual output accountable and traceable.

3. AI Boosts Expert Consulting from 'Experience-Driven' to 'Data-Driven'

What truly transforms online consultations with biological experts is the integration of AI protein design technology.

In traditional expert consulting, experts mainly rely on personal experience and literature knowledge to propose mutation plans. But when AI models can virtually screen hundreds of thousands or even millions of mutants and predict their thermal stability, aggregation tendency, expression levels, and affinity changes in advance, experts’ judgments gain unprecedented data insight. Experts are no longer working solo—they’re leveraging AI computing power to make decisions from a higher-dimensional perspective.

Here’s a concrete example: an industrial enzyme needs to increase its optimal reaction temperature by 10°C while maintaining catalytic activity. In the past, scientists might have done several rounds of random mutations and directed evolution, screening thousands of clones. Nowadays, AI models can evaluate changes in folding free energy (ΔΔG) and active site structure disruption for a massive number of virtual mutants within hours, producing a high-priority mutation recommendation list. Then, human experts combine protein structure, substrate channels, and evolutionary conservation for a second-round screening, ultimately pinpointing just a few dozen single or combined mutants that need experimental verification.

This is the development acceleration unleashed by the collaboration of 'AI experts'.

4. MatwingsVenus™ in Practice: Expert Online Consultation Model in Protein Engineering

In the exploration of deeply integrating AI with biological expert consultation, Shanghai Matwings Technology's platform MatwingsVenus™ (Xiaowu™) provides a practical approach. MatwingsVenus™ (Xiaowu™) is positioned as a “conversational protein R&D agent.” It’s an agent-centered, one-stop protein research platform where users can complete the entire workflow—from industry research and database searches to protein design, automated experimental validation, and expert online collaboration—through natural language conversation.

The core capabilities of MatwingsVenus™ (Xiaowu™) mainly focus on the following areas:

a. AI Protein Design: The platform uses a self-developed general-purpose protein design model to conduct multi-dimensional analysis of target proteins, helping researchers design protein modification plans more efficiently.

b. Online Collaboration Mode: Once a user initiates a project on the platform, a professional team steps in to interpret the AI analysis results. Through online collaboration, they advance the project together with the user, combining expert judgment with AI computation.

c. Service Coverage Areas: The platform can serve multiple application scenarios, including but not limited to improving enzyme thermal stability, maturing antibody affinity, and optimizing the developability of candidate molecules—common needs in protein engineering.

d. Data-Driven Iteration: During project progression, the user's experimental data can be fed back into the platform to guide the next round of design optimization, creating a "compute-experiment-recompute" closed-loop R&D model.

This model solidifies "expert experience" into reusable workflows, while each consultation also feeds professional insights back into the AI model, forming a continuously evolving intelligent consultation system. Centered on the self-developed protein design model and agent, and delivered through the online platform, it integrates expert interpretation into the R&D process, enabling companies or research teams to access professional support in protein design with lower communication costs.

Platform Backend

How does online expert collaboration work?

On the MatwingsVenus™ (Xiaowu™) platform, online expert collaboration isn’t a standalone consulting module; it’s a routine capability deeply integrated into the full protein R&D process.

Users can chat with the AI in natural language to carry out tasks like industry research, data retrieval, and protein design. If professional judgment is needed during design evaluation, experimental strategy planning, or result interpretation, users can easily request expert consultation within the platform. The platform brings together over 50 certified experts in protein engineering, structural biology, computational biology, and other fields. Once a consultation is requested, the platform matches experts based on project type and needs.

There are two ways experts get involved: Light consultation—experts review AI-generated design plans and provide feasibility assessments and optimization suggestions; Deep collaboration—experts join the project from start to finish, working alongside users and the AI to advance the complete process from design to experiment. All communication, design plans, and experimental data during the consultation are recorded on the platform, creating a traceable R&D archive.

It’s worth noting that experts don’t work separately from the AI workflow. More than 30 expert-tuned Skills, covering common scenarios like directed evolution, enzyme mining, and de novo design, are pre-embedded in the platform. Experts can use these Skills together with AI computations and automated experiment feedback to make more accurate decisions. This collaborative mode—AI-generated plan → expert review and optimization → experimental feedback → AI redesign—ensures that every expert intervention is not just a one-time answer but part of a continuous R&D loop.

5. The Future of Online Biological Expert Consultation

The Future of Online Consultations with Biological Experts

With the continuous evolution of AI technology and the ongoing improvement of platform ecosystems, "online consultation with biology experts" is turning from a "luxury" into "infrastructure." The R&D capabilities that were once only accessible to large enterprises and top research institutions are now becoming shared resources that individuals and small teams can also tap into.

For most people working in bio R&D, this means:

- Expert resources are no longer out of reach — more than 50 experts certified on the platform

- Consultation efficiency greatly improved — from "waiting weeks" to "initiating anytime"

- R&D costs significantly reduced — no need to build a full expert team

- Innovation threshold steadily lowered — more ideas can be quickly tested

The essence of online consultation with biology experts is to make professional wisdom flow more efficiently, ensuring that every valuable R&D idea can get the expert support it deserves. Platforms like MatwingsVenus™ (XiaoWu™) are making this vision a reality.