Hi everybody,

I am pleased to announce that Babel 2026jul22 [1] is now available! If you are a member of the Translator project, I’ve shared the download links in our Slack channel; if not, I plan to create a publicly accessible version of this release that you can download in the next few weeks. Babel 2026jul22 is available for testing on NodeNorm Experimental (https://nodenormalization-exp.apps.renci.org/docs) and NameRes Experimental (https://name-resolution-exp.apps.renci.org/docs). Unless I hear from you by Wednesday, I plan to update NodeNorm Dev [2] and NameRes Dev [3] next Thursday, August 20, 2026 starting around 1pm ET, with 2-4 hours of downtime expected. The APIs have not changed significantly, but you may want to check if your software works against these new endpoints before I switch, and please let me know if I shouldn’t do the upgrade next week (e.g. if you have a significant presentation or need stability around that time).

Here is a list of the most significant changes in this release — there are a LOT of them since this is the first Babel release since 2026sep1 (the current NodeNorm on Translator CI):

Lots of substantial changes to Proteins (big reduction from UniProtKB's removal of non-reference proteins), chemicals (mostly reorganizations from small molecule from/to other chemical entities), MacromolecularComplex (add all complexes from ComplexPortal, not just S. cerevisiae)
Added the Mammalian Phenotype Ontology and the EMAPA Mouse Developmental Anatomy Ontology, as well as tooling to judge the effect of adding new sources to Babel
DrugBank entries that are food or complex molecular mixtures have been retyped as food (but see one outstanding bug)
Improved preferred labels and fixed several bugs in gene names and synonyms, ChEMBL labels and others.
ChEBI secondary identifiers and PubChem xrefs have been restored
Simplified how we choose DrugChemical conflation clique leaders
Metadata files now provide some information on the provenance of each of the output files -- all xrefs used should be included here, information on individual downloads coming later this year
NodeNorm Redis loaders and NameRes loaders are now much faster, and NodeNorm Redis can support recent Solr versions.
NameRes searches using only_taxa no longer filter out identifiers that are not taxon specific (example)
Significant improvements to documentation for Babel, NodeNorm Redis and NameRes Solr
Significant rewrite of the testing systems for these tools, especially for Babel unit tests and "pipeline tests" that exercise entire pipelines.
Richer release notes starting with this release include both LLM-assisted detailed reports and multiple reports showing CURIE usage, xref used, and other information.

Please let me know if you have any questions about this release.

cheers,

Gaurav

[1] https://github.com/NCATSTranslator/Babel/blob/main/releases/2026jul22

[2] https://nodenormalization-sri.renci.org/docs

[3] https://name-resolution-sri.renci.org/docs