&imwidth=800&imheight=600&format=webp&quality=medium "Scientists use artificial intelligence to design brand new viruses; what implications could it have?")
Artificial Intelligence (AI) is slowly taking over several aspects of our lives. Like in healthcare it is being used for diagnosing diseases, in education it is helping personalise learning platforms, while in Business and Finance it is helping detect fraud in banking and is being used as customer service chatbot.
Now it is being used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory. Yes you heard that right.
It is for the first time that whole genomes have been successfully designed by AI. This raises hopes for new medicines but also concerns over how to ensure the technology remains safe.
Genome language models, the genetic equivalent of the large language models behind AI chatbots was used by Dr Brian Hie, a chemical engineer at Stanford University in California to design functioning genomes for bacteriophages. This infects only specific species of bacteria.
According to a study published in the journal ‘Science’ titled ‘Generative Design of Bacteriophages with Genome Language Models’, the 16 AI designs - out of 300 AI-generated genomes - synthesised in the lab using AI models called Evo1 and Evo2 proved effective at killing E. coli bacteria.
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The research carried out by scientists from Stanford University and the California-based Arc Institute wanted to find out whether they can take the help of AI in creating an entirely new, functional virus from scratch that would not harm human but a bacteriophage, or phage, which infects bacteria.
The ability to “rapidly design” genomes and tune them for specific bugs while overcoming resistance could “transform phage therapy” and “expand biotechnological toolkits”, the researchers wrote in the journal Science.
Though, this is a big step in synthetic biology, experts say that this AI technology can be misused to create dangerous biological agents, ranging from lethal pathogens to potential pandemics.
