#57 - If We Can Invent New Viruses Should We
AI can now “autocomplete” DNA, and researchers are using that ability to design real, working viruses in the lab. We dig into a Science paper that trains genome language models to generate brand-new bacteriophage genomes, then validates them by building the phages and testing whether they actually infect E. coli. If you’ve been curious about AI in genomics, synthetic biology, or what comes after today’s large language models, this is a concrete example of design, not just prediction.
We walk through the key ideas without assuming you’re a biologist: what a bacteriophage is, why ΦX174 is a…
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