Bob Novella
speaker
4,920 appearances
18 recordings
1 series
first heard Apr 2026
last heard 19 Sep
Bob Novella’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 18 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 4.
Appearances
This is why researchers are right now exploring these phages and the precise treatments that they could eventually bring to us for antibiotic-resistant bacteria.
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And if you don't know about what is going on in the world of antibiotic-resistant bacteria, well, there is a growing problem caused by several things.
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One of them is people taking their medication and not finishing their antibiotics.
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You can get some nasty bacteria that comes out of that happening over and over and over and over again.
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And it's always good to future-proof ourselves from future potential heavy-duty bacterial threats, which happen from time to time.
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The California team at Stratford and ARC Institute, they were focusing on PHIX174.
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This is a tiny phage with a genome of about 5,000 bases and 11 genes.
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In a virus, this genome is a single continuous piece of DNA or RNA, and that tells the host cell which proteins they produce and how to assemble new virus particles, right?
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This is all basic virus information.
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PHI X174, this is a well-known and very much heavily studied phage, which makes it a perfect test case for these synthetic genome designs that they're coming up with.
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The researchers also used the LLM that is specifically trained on DNA sequences.
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So it wasn't just a standard out-of-the-box LLM.
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They were training it to essentially only understand DNA, and there wasn't even really like a talking component to it.
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You couldn't just type into it.
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The way that they were communicating with it was largely just based on them pumping in DNA information and it spitting out DNA information.
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And that LLM was part of the EVO and EVO2 family of artificial intelligence systems.
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You could read a little bit more about them.
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They're being used for different things.
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So they used it to write complete virus genomes from scratch.
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And the AI was able to do this very well because the models were trained, like I said, on just a huge amount of data about bacteria and virus and everything.
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Showing 41–60 of 4,920 · page 3 of 246
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