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This AI Just Created Viruses Not Found in Nature
Researchers successfully used AI to synthesize entirely new, viable viruses that do not exist in nature.
What: Scientists trained AI models on natural DNA patterns to generate novel viral recipes, which were then synthesized into DNA molecules and confirmed to be infectious in bacterial hosts.
Why it matters: This breakthrough shifts AI in biology from merely identifying existing structures to actively inventing novel biological agents, raising urgent questions about the pace of synthetic biology regulation.
Decoder
- Viable: Capable of working, in this context meaning a synthetic virus that can successfully infect its target and replicate.
Original article
Researchers have used AI to create new kinds of viruses for the first time. They taught AI to recognize patterns of DNA structure in nature and then use that data to write recipes for entirely new viruses. The researchers followed those recipes to create DNA molecules, which they inserted into bacteria. The viruses were able to infect other bacteria, demonstrating that they were viable.
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