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Shipped 2026-09-28 · Bower A research answer is only useful if you can check where it came from. When we went through how Bower handles scientific questions, the failures that mattered were not gaps in knowledge. They were answers that looked sourced and were not: a gene ID recalled from memory, a citation typed into a note from memory, statistics written up after the analysis never ran. This release makes each of those checkable, or stops it.

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What’s new

  • Database lookups with a link to the record. Ask for a gene, protein, compound or structure (“what’s the UniProt accession for SOX2?”, “which chromosome band is CFTR on?”) and Bower looks it up in NCBI Gene, UniProt, Ensembl, ChEMBL or the RCSB Protein Data Bank instead of answering from memory. Every result links to the public record, so you can open it and check. Bower tells you when it matched your query through an alias rather than the official symbol, since an alias can name more than one gene, and when an NCBI Gene record has been retired and what replaced it. Reference questions are also noticeably faster.
  • Sequence work done in code. Reverse complement, complement, reverse, translation, GC content, motif search and length are computed exactly rather than worked out in Bower’s head. It takes one DNA or RNA sequence at a time, up to 100,000 characters.
  • Citations checked before they are saved. When Bower writes a DOI into a note, it has to be one that came back from a tool, such as a literature lookup, or that you typed in the conversation. If Bower tries to save a DOI it never actually saw, the save is stopped, and Bower has to use the DOI exactly as a lookup returned it or leave the citation out. This applies in chat and in live sessions.
  • A clear note when figures were not computed. If code could not run in a conversation, for example because the session’s analysis limit was reached, and a reply then states figures that came from no tool and not from you, Bower puts a note above the reply saying those figures were not computed by code, so you can check them before relying on them.

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Notes

  • Database lookups use public services. Bower never sends one from a workspace in Restricted mode, or when you turn off Public sources in the connector picker.
  • A DOI you say out loud in a live session is not accepted as verified, so a misheard digit cannot end up in your notes as fact. Type it in chat, or ask Bower to look the paper up.
  • The citation check covers DOIs Bower saves from now on. It does not re-check citations already in your notes.
  • The figure note appears only when code could not run. It does not mean the numbers are wrong: a small calculation done without code is often right. It means check them before you rely on them.