Large genome models used to design new viruses
The AI system makes genetically distant versions of a bacteria-killing virus.
The AI system makes genetically distant versions of a bacteria-killing virus.
The short version
- A lot of the AI work in biology has been focused on designing proteins.
- That’s partly because proteins do most of the business of life, catalyzing the interesting chemistry and structuring cells.
- So, figuring out how to make a new protein can mean directly tinkering with biochemistry, providing new and potentially useful functions.
What happened
Since the genetic code provides a layer of abstraction between DNA and proteins, it wasn’t obvious what a model trained on DNA could do. Yet people went ahead and made a large genome model, and it turned out to be able to output DNA sequences that could encode functional proteins in bacteria and mimic the gene structures found in complex cells.
Why it matters
Now, those same models have been used to output the genomes of viruses that infect bacteria.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.