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Self-driving laboratories to autonomously navigate the protein fitness landscape | Nature Chemical Engineering

nature.com · 8,679 words · saved by 1 readers

Protein engineering is a powerful tool to create new proteins with useful functions and behaviors, but it is slow, laborious and requires specialized knowledge, limiting its broad application. Here, the authors present a system that combines AI and experimental automation to autonomously engineer proteins without human intervention.

Main Human researchers engineer biological systems through the discovery-driven process of hypothesis generation, designing experiments to test hypotheses, performing these experiments in a wet laboratory, and interpreting the resulting data to refine understanding of the system. This process is iterated to converge on knowledge of biological mechanisms and design new systems with improved properties and behaviors. However, despite notable achievements in biological engineering and synthetic biology, this process remains highly inefficient, repetitive and laborious, requiring multiple…

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