Vibe genes? Natural(ish) language comes to protein, genome design software
You can apparently now tell AI tools what sort of protein you want them to make.
You can apparently now tell AI tools what sort of protein you want them to make.
The short version
- Protein design tools may be getting increasingly sophisticated , but you still need a sophisticated understanding of protein structure for them to work.
- This can include knowing enzyme mechanisms down to the positions of specific amino acids, as well as the water molecules that also occupy the area where catalysis takes place.
- Once you specify these, the tools can build the rest of a protein around this target.
What happened
A large collaboration of researchers based in China, however, decided to bring protein design to the masses, making a tool that can take natural language prompts and use them to produce proteins with the function you specify. If your measure for success is a working protein, then the success rate may not be great.
Why it matters
But they still manage to get the job done.
Summary by Nerd News Network. Read the full article at Ars Technica via the links above and below.