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Scientists Used A.I. to Redesign a Microbe's Machinery to Function Without a Key Ingredient of Life
Key takeaways
- Cells of the species are artificially colored blue in this microscope image.
- The work, published in the journal Science on April 30, suggests that proteins can be trimmed and remain stable.
- “It’s a tremendous tour de force,” says Kaihang Wang, a Caltech synthetic biologist who was not involved in the study, to Elie Dolgin at Nature.
Cells of the species are artificially colored blue in this microscope image. IMAGE POINT FR / NIH / NIAID / Universal Images Group via Getty Images Almost all life on Earth builds its proteins from the same set of 20 building blocks, called amino acids. Some organisms have an extra one or two, but none have fewer. Now, researchers have used artificial intelligence to reengineer a bacterium so that some of its key machinery—not the entire microbe—can function with a missing amino acid.
The work, published in the journal Science on April 30, suggests that proteins can be trimmed and remain stable. The findings pave new avenues for research in the field of synthetic biology and allow scientists to understand what early life may have looked like.
“It’s a tremendous tour de force,” says Kaihang Wang, a Caltech synthetic biologist who was not involved in the study, to Elie Dolgin at Nature. But, he notes, “it’s a first baby step of a grand journey” to creating a cell that runs on a reduced set of amino acids.