Scientists Use Machine Learning to Speed Up Biofuel Production

Researchers from the U.S. Department of Energy's Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory have created a new method using machine learning to accelerate the design of microbes that produce biofuel. To speed up the production of biofuels, the scientists developed a computer algorithm that begins with abundant data about the proteins and metabolites in a biofuel-producing microbial. However, the algorithm does not contain information about how the pathway actually work and instead uses data from previous experiments to learn how the pathway will behave. This new technique enables scientists to automatically predict the amount of biofuel produced by pathways that have been added to E. coli bacterial cells. A pathway is a series of chemical reactions in a cell that produce a specific compound, which researchers have sought to find ways to re-engineer and import from one microbe to another.