Artificial Intelligence agents for biological research: a survey

The rapid growth of biological data and experimental complexity has motivated increasing interest in artificial intelligence (AI) systems that extend beyond static prediction toward autonomous reasoning and action. While recent computational models achieve strong predictive performance, they largely operate as passive tools within human-driven research workflows. In contrast, AI agents integrate reasoning, planning, tool invocation, and feedback-driven refinement, enabling more adaptive and interactive forms of biological analysis. This survey provides a systematic synthesis of recent progress in biological AI agents by reviewing over 100 representative studies across clinical analytics, molecular and drug design, multi-omics analysis, and knowledge discovery. We introduce a unified 5D taxonomy that organizes existing work along task domains, system architectures, interaction modes, evaluation strategies, and resource integration. Building on this framework, we analyze common design patterns, highlight emerging capabilities enabled by agentic paradigms, and identify key open challenges, including reliability, privacy, scalability, and standardized evaluation. Collectively, this survey clarifies the conceptual and methodological landscape of biological AI agents and outlines directions toward more robust, transparent, and collaborative agent-based systems for biological research. To serve as a living resource for the community, we curated a GitHub repository that includes resources and benchmark summaries, available at https://github.com/MineSelf2016/biological_agents_survey.