ORIGINAL PROTEINS GENERATED FROM SCRATCH USING AI

With the help of Salesforce Research, scientists recently created an AI-powered system that’s able to generate artificial enzymes from nothing. And, the results are incredible. In fact, according to researchers, laboratory tests proved that the newly created enzymes work as well as those found in nature, despite the fact that their artificially-generated amino acid sequences were characteristically apart from any known natural protein.

The AI program, called ProGen, was developed by Salesforce Research and uses next-token prediction as a means by which to assemble amino acid sequences into artificial proteins. According to scientists involved in the project, the breakthrough is set to revolutionize the half-century-old field of protein engineering by significantly facilitating the development of new proteins that can serve a number of different purposes, from use within therapeutics to contributing to the process of degrading plastics.

The ProGen program was developed as a natural language model to read and write language text. However, it was discovered that it also displayed the ability to learn at least some of the underlying principles of biology, presenting the opportunity to leverage the program for different effects.

In order to do so, scientists simply fed the amino acid sequences of 280 million different proteins of all kinds into the machine learning model, allowing a couple of weeks for it to dissect all of the information. Shortly thereafter, the scientists primed the model by inputting 56,000 sequences from 5 lysozyme families, in addition to contextual information about the proteins.

What resulted was the generation of over a million sequences in a remarkably short amount of time, from which the researchers selected 100 to test. Of these 100 proteins, 5 artificial proteins were chosen to test in order to compare their activity to enzymes found in the whites of chicken eggs. Testing revealed that sequences between the artificial and natural enzymes were only around 18 per cent identical. However, it was also proven through study that the AI-generated enzymes showed activity even when as little as 31.4 per cent of their sequence resembled any known natural protein.

It’s a breakthrough that shows tremendous potential and limitless possibilities with respect to the study of functional proteins, signalling a new era of protein design.

Brain shielded and monitored by newly discovered anatomy

The most complex part of the human body, the brain continues to reveal its wonders and incredible capabilities to the scientists and researchers who study its form and function. In fact, it’s been discovered that a component of the brain anatomy, which until now was completely unknown, serves as a protective barrier as well as a platform from which immune cells surveil the brain for infection and inflammation.

This type of study of the living human brain at such a granular and detailed level has been made possible by recent advances in neuro-imaging and molecular biology, enabling boundless opportunities to continue furthering our understanding of the brain. And, this latest study, put forward by the labs of Maiken Nedergaard, co-director of the Center for Translational Neuromedicine at the University of Rochester and the University of Copenhagen and Kjeld Møllgård, M.D., a professor of neuroanatomy at the University of Copenhagen, has helped to identify a new layer within the brain dividing the space below the arachnoid layer, the subarachnoid space, into two compartments, which researchers have called SLYM (Subarachnoidal LYmphatic-like Membrane).

The discovery made by Nedergaard and Møllgård is a significant one when it comes to the study of the brain, particularly with respect to bettering our understanding of the diseases that impact the organ. It could lead to a more comprehensive interpretation of conditions such as multiple sclerosis, central nervous system infections, and Alzheimer’s, how their symptoms might be triggered or worsened by abnormalities in SLYM function, and ways by which treatment for symptoms can be enhanced.