Scientists have created the first ever viruses designed by artificial intelligence (AI), and they’re capable of hunting down and killing strains of Escherichia coli (E. coli).
“This is the first time AI systems are able to write coherent genome-scale sequences,” says Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford University, California. “The next step is AI-generated life,” says Hie, but his colleague Samuel King adds that “a lot of experimental advances need to occur in order to design an entire living organism”.
The study, by Hie, King and colleagues, was posted on the preprint server bioRxiv on 17 September1 and is not yet peer reviewed, but the authors say that it shows the potential of AI to design biotechnological tools and therapies for treating bacterial infections. “Hopefully, a strategy like this can complement existing phage-therapy strategies and someday augment the therapeutics [to] target pathogens of concern,” says Hie.
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