Scientists have created a new virus in the laboratory by using AI to design its entire genetic code, achieving this milestone for the first time. They confirmed that the virus is intended to kill bacteria and is harmless to humans.
Foreign news agencies reported that a research team from Stanford University in the United States succeeded in creating 16 new laboratory viruses by using artificial intelligence (AI) to completely redesign the viruses' genomes for the first time.
Scientists stated that all 16 viruses were engineered to target bacteria and pose no danger to humans. They can replicate and function effectively, with six of them proven to kill the bacterium Escherichia coli (E. coli).
Researchers used AI models named Evo1 and Evo2, which operate similarly to large language models like ChatGPT but predict biological sequence structures instead of text. They trained the AI on genetic codes from various organisms until it could synthesize new bacteriophages—viruses that kill bacteria.
This achievement marks a major breakthrough in synthetic biology, opening new avenues for modern disease treatment such as using bacteriophages to combat antibiotic resistance, developing enzymes to treat genetic disorders, and creating antibodies for immunotherapy.
However, experts from Johns Hopkins University warned that this technology raises urgent biosecurity concerns because it could be misused to develop new pathogens or biological weapons.
To prevent creating viruses harmful to humans, the research team excluded viruses infecting complex organisms from the AI training datasets and limited experiments to highly secure laboratories, testing only bacteriophages that destroy bacteria.
Although bacteriophage genomes are relatively small—around 5,400 base pairs compared to the human genome’s 3 billion base pairs—researchers view this as just the beginning of using AI to write genetic codes for creating new life forms in the future.
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Source:bbc