I told AI to make me a protein. Here’s what it came up with

I recently used AI to design an awful protein. Following step-by-step instructions, I made a rudimentary protein language model (PLM) — an artificial intelligence (AI) tool that churns out protein sequences instead of words. With a couple of lines of copied-and-pasted code, I asked the model to dream up a short sequence of amino acids.

I didn’t know how bad my protein was until I asked AlphaFold, Google DeepMind’s protein-structure predictor, what it looked like. The predicted structure had helices, loops and other realistic elements. But AlphaFold had very low confidence in its prediction — a sign that my molecule probably couldn’t be made in cells in the laboratory, let alone do anything useful.

Now, dabblers in computational biology like me have fresh hope. Scientists are developing a new generation of biological AI tools that take instructions in plain language and turn them into proteins and other molecules, including potential drugs. The models also allow researchers to ‘talk’ to cells in ordinary English to decipher their inner workings and glean other biological insights.

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