Dr. Richard Moulange

And what's...

Impressive and a little bit concerning about this result is what the team were able to do was that they had the base EVO2 model and then they fine-tuned it on what are called bacteriophages.

So these are viruses that eat, that kill bacteria.

fine-tuned it on maybe something like 15,000 of those, and then started prompting it with the beginnings of known bacteriophage genomes to see if they could make new ones.

So this is, again, akin to with LLMs.

You say, okay, well, write me a story about this kind of topic.

You know, I don't know, a murder mystery.

And then you start with, you know, a classic opening sentence and see where the LLM takes you.

It's the same kind of thing.

And what they did is they discovered the sequences that the model produced are going to be new.

They're going to be different than existing genomes.

And this is huge because this is the first time that an AI design of a genome has turned out to actually work.

be novel.

It really is very different than existing bacteriophages, existing viruses.

I think the most different one was 7% different than anything that we've seen in nature before.

And they work in the lab.

And more than that, it didn't just make viable genomes.

They worked better.

They functioned better than the best bacteriophages that we already know.

So these bacteriophages, they're viruses that kill E. coli, a very common bacterium that you hopefully don't find in your home, but you have to watch out to kill it with bleach, this sort of thing.