Scientists develop new method to generate protein datasets for training AI

Protein engineering is a field primed for artificial intelligence research. Each protein is made up of amino acids; to optimize a protein function, researchers modify proteins by switching out one of 20 different amino acids for another. For a protein that is just 50 amino acids in length, this leads to approximately 1.13 10 potential combinations to test. This number of potential combinations, impossible to test in the lab, makes protein engineering an ideal challenge for AI. Modeling which of these combinations will give the best results is a perfect problem for the technology's massive computing power.