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BioTrouble: A Multi-Agent Workflow for Troubleshooting Molecular Biology Techniques

Ameri, M.; Yousefabadi, H.; Ramezani, A.

2026-01-02 bioinformatics
10.64898/2025.12.30.697016 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Troubleshooting is a critical yet often underdocumented aspect of molecular biology experiments across laboratories. Failures in core techniques such as PCR, qPCR, molecular cloning, and related assays can lead to experimental failure, wasted resources, and delays in research progress. Here, we present BioTrouble, a multi-agent AI workflow designed to assist researchers in troubleshooting a wide range of molecular biology experiments. It leverages a custom-designed troubleshooting knowledge base through a retrieval-augmented generation (RAG) framework. BioTrouble employs small language models to generate the troubleshooting plan and utilizes a smart model routing system to manage cost per request. User interactions and feedback are stored as structured cases, enabling BioTrouble to expand its troubleshooting knowledge base and improve response generation over time. Compared with single-model SOTA LLM, BioTrouble generated comparable troubleshooting recommendations using small language models.

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The top 5 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.