New AI Speeds Discovery in Synthetic Biology

Synthetic biology, like artificial intelligence (AI) machine learning, is a relatively modern field that applies emerging technologies to achieve innovation. Now scientists at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) in California merged the two fields by creating a machine learning algorithm for synthetic biology called ART (Automated Recommendation Tool), and published their study a few weeks ago in Nature Communications. Synthetic biology includes the design and formation of novel biological systems or components, and the redesign and production of natural biological systems. Many industries benefit from advances in synthetic biology. Examples include cosmetics, pharmaceutical drugs, vaccines, food and beverage, consumer products, agriculture, delivery plasmids, BioBrick parts, synthetic cells, bioinformatics, DNA synthesis, gene editing, oligonucleotides, chemicals, synthetic genes, and health care.