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Evo 2 Can Design Entire Genomes

asimov.press · 2,866 words · saved by 1 readers

A new AI model for biology, released today by Arc Institute and NVIDIA, can predict which mutations within a gene are likely to be harmful and even design small, eukaryotic genomes.

Ella Watkins-Dulaney For more than a quarter-century, synthetic biologists have dreamt of designing new biological systems: gene circuits that behave like electrical ones, for example, or entirely original life forms. But nature rarely cooperates, and a slew of prior attempts suggest that even the brightest scientific minds cannot design biology as exquisitely as evolution. Most bioengineers, therefore, tweak and repurpose what nature has already provided; they modify existing genomes and enzymes to create bespoke tools, tinkering here or there to drive biological progress forward. AI…

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