Large genome models used to design new viruses
摘要
生物学领域的AI研究多聚焦于蛋白质设计，而大型基因组模型已能输出编码功能性蛋白的DNA序列并模拟复杂细胞基因结构。斯坦福大学研究者利用此类模型生成了感染细菌的病毒基因组，这些病毒虽与现有病毒高度相关，却具备难以通过进化获得的独特特征。研究者提醒，应提前防范未来可能出现的、能够设计靶向脊椎动物病毒的同类AI技术。
A lot of the AI work in biology has been focused on designing proteins. That's partly because proteins do most of the business of life, catalyzing the interesting chemistry and structuring cells. So, figuring out how to make a new protein can mean directly tinkering with biochemistry, providing new and potentially useful functions.
Since the genetic code provides a layer of abstraction between DNA and proteins, it wasn't obvious what a model trained on DNA could do. Yet people went ahead and made a large genome model, and it turned out to be able to output DNA sequences that could encode functional proteins in bacteria and mimic the gene structures found in complex cells. Now, those same models have been used to output the genomes of viruses that infect bacteria.
This isn't science fiction—all the viruses the models created are closely related to an existing virus. But they do have some distinct features that would be challenging to evolve. And the researchers who did the work, based at Stanford University, suggest we may want to start thinking now about preparing for the potential that someone could develop a related AI that can design a virus that targets vertebrates.
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