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Show HN: Open-source GUI for editing 3D molecular structures with diffusion

Patchr is an open-source GUI tool for editing 3D molecular structures, using diffusion models to enable intuitive molecular design and manipulation.

Background

- DeepFoldProtein (the creator) is a Chinese AI research team focused on computational biology — not to be confused with DeepMind's AlphaFold, though they work on similar problems. - "patchr" is an open-source desktop tool with a graphical interface for directly manipulating 3D molecular structures (proteins, small molecules, etc.) using diffusion models, a type of generative AI that iteratively refines noisy data into realistic outputs. - Most AI drug-discovery tools either predict static structures (e.g., AlphaFold) or generate molecules without letting users manually edit them. Patchr lets you grab atoms and drag them, then uses a diffusion model to "heal" or re-optimize the edited molecule into a chemically plausible shape — like a generative "undo" that respects physics. - This matters because real drug design is iterative: chemists need to tweak a candidate compound and see how the AI adjusts the rest, not just get one-shot predictions. Open-source availability means labs can run it locally without sending proprietary molecular data to a cloud API.