Eric Nguyen

It has grammar, structure, sort of like sentences and paragraphs that group together to form a story.

And these stories are passed down through evolution, generation by generation.

For humans, it's been hard to comprehend these stories written in DNA, in large part because of its scale.

DNA is extremely long, and yet at the same time sensitive to the smallest mistakes.

Imagine trying to write something the length of 30,000 books in a foreign language, and that when you're off by a single letter, one of billions.

This can mean the difference between a healthy person and a person with a life-threatening disease.

And so to tackle these challenges, together with my colleague Michael Polley, we developed an AI that could generate extremely long sequences of DNA, 500 times longer than previous AI models, at high levels of detail.

We assembled a team of scientists and AI experts and gathered the largest collection of DNA used to train AI.

80,000 whole genomes fed into a model that we called Evo.

And our goal was to create something like a chat GPT for DNA, where you can prompt Evo and describe the DNA you want, and it would generate new sequences, one letter at a time.

But there is one key difference.

With chatbots, you can just read what it writes, and you can decide if it makes sense to you.

With DNA,

It's not so simple.

It's not an intuitive human language.

How do you know if it's any real or good?

What does that even mean?

What we needed was a test, a way to verify that what it wrote would actually function.

And so we started with a familiar tool in biology called CRISPR.

CRISPR is like a pair of molecular scissors that can edit DNA, used for things like gene therapy.