AI Approach Relies on Big Data and Machine Learning to Design New Proteins

A team lead by researchers in the Pritzker School of Molecular Engineering (PME) at the University of Chicago reports that it has developed an artificial intelligence-led process that uses big data to design new proteins that could have implications across the healthcare, agriculture, and energy sectors. By developing machine-learning models that can review protein information culled from genome databases, the scientists say they found relatively simple design rules for building artificial proteins. When the team constructed these artificial proteins in the lab, they discovered that they performed chemistries so well that they rivaled those found in nature. "We have all wondered how a simple process like evolution can lead to such a high-performance material as a protein," said Rama Ranganathan, PhD, Joseph Regenstein Professor in the Department of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology, Pritzker Molecular Engineering, and the College. "We found that genome data contains enormous amounts of information about the basic rules of protein structure and function, and now we've been able to bottle nature's rules to create proteins ourselves."