A team of researchers from Stanford University and the Arc Institute in Palo Alto, California say they’ve created viruses with AI-designed DNA that can target and kill specific bacteria.
And these aren’t just simulated possibilities — they’re real and already slaying germs in the lab.
The work, published in a new study awaiting peer-review, is a compelling testament to the usefulness of large language models in bioengineering applications, the authors say.
“This is the first time AI systems are able to write coherent genome-scale sequences,” senior author Brian Hie, a Stanford computational biologist, told Nature. “The next step is AI-generated life.”
Coauthor Samuel King, however, cautioned that a “lot of experimental advances need to occur in order to design an entire living organism.”
Viruses aren’t quite considered to be alive. Think of them like pesky little genomic robots that hijack our biology to replicate, since they don’t generate their own energy and can’t reproduce on their own. They aren’t made of cells, and are driven by a ruthless set of programmed instructions to multiply at all costs. Since their genomes are pretty simple, they’re easier to tinker with and less ambitious for a human or machine to recreate. Remember: a genome is all the DNA in an organism, not just a few strands.
In the study, the researchers used an AI model called Evo to dream up the virus genomes. Unlike a general purpose large language model, Evo is specifically trained on millions of bacteriophage genomes.
A bacteriophage is a virus that infects bacteria. To use as a jumping off point, the researchers chose a phage called phiX174 (or ΦX174), which infects strains of the wide family of bacteria known as E. coli. As the first DNA-based genome to be sequenced, phiX174 is an extensively studied and well understood virus, and only has around 5,400 base pairs and 11 genes, according to Nature.
After probing the AI model, the team came up with 302 virus designs. The best way to test them, the researchers figured, was to print, or chemically assemble, all of them and unleash them on real strains of E. Coli.
As it turned out, some of them worked. Once inserted into the poor waiting germs, 16 of the AI-designed viruses successfully infected their hosts by inserting their DNA, hijacking the bacteria to start cranking out copies of themselves, and then burst through the cell’s body, killing it.
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