A research team at a US university announced that it had successfully used AI to design entirely new viruses. It identified 16 types of phages that could be synthesized and propagated in the laboratory, and found that they infect E. coli.
A team of researchers from Stanford University in the United States and partner institutions used artificial intelligence to attempt to design viral genomes, creating new viruses that functioned in the laboratory, the BBC reported. The viruses designed in the study infect only bacteria and are not considered a threat to humans.
For the study, the AI models “Evo1” and “Evo2” used a method to predict and design the genetic information of viruses, which was then synthesized and tested in the laboratory. The researchers selected 302 promising types and confirmed that 16 of them were effective at killing E. coli.
The research team said it carried out the phage design under conditions designed to maximize safety and took steps to reduce risks, including excluding from the training database viruses with the potential to infect bacteria. Those involved view the achievement as “demonstrating one aspect of AI’s capabilities in synthetic biology.”