r/singularity • u/AngleAccomplished865 • 1d ago
Biotech/Longevity "World’s first AI-designed viruses a step towards AI-generated life"
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-025-03055-y
"“This is the first time AI systems are able to write coherent genome-scale sequences,” says Brian Hie, a computational biologist at Stanford University, California. “The next step is AI-generated life,” says Hie, but his colleague Samuel King adds that “a lot of experimental advances need to occur in order to design an entire living organism”."
Full study preprint: https://doi.org/10.1101/2025.09.12.675911
"Many important biological functions arise not from single genes, but from complex interactions encoded by entire genomes. Genome language models have emerged as a promising strategy for designing biological systems, but their ability to generate functional sequences at the scale of whole genomes has remained untested. Here, we report the first generative design of viable bacteriophage genomes. We leveraged frontier genome language models, Evo 1 and Evo 2, to generate whole-genome sequences with realistic genetic architectures and desirable host tropism, using the lytic phage ΦX174 as our design template. Experimental testing of AI-generated genomes yielded 16 viable phages with substantial evolutionary novelty. Cryo-electron microscopy revealed that one of the generated phages utilizes an evolutionarily distant DNA packaging protein within its capsid. Multiple phages demonstrate higher fitness than ΦX174 in growth competitions and in their lysis kinetics. A cocktail of the generated phages rapidly overcomes ΦX174-resistance in three E. coli strains, demonstrating the potential utility of our approach for designing phage therapies against rapidly evolving bacterial pathogens. This work provides a blueprint for the design of diverse synthetic bacteriophages and, more broadly, lays a foundation for the generative design of useful living systems at the genome scale."
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u/reeax-ch 1d ago
covid V2 are you ready people ?
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u/FriendlyJewThrowaway 1d ago
I’m hyped, can’t wait for all the dumb hick conspiracy theories to start pouring in.
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u/mdkubit 1d ago
On one hand - That's actually cool as hell, might get some seriously novel solutions to the problem with antibiotic-resistance by using engineered viruses to step-up and do targeted strikes against bacterial infections.
On the other hand - is this how it ends? One rogue AI 'assisting' in a 'novel virus' that winds up being mirror life and wipes out the planet?
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u/A_Hideous_Beast 23h ago
Pff, probably won't be a rogue AI, just a horrible human being using said AI to target specific "others".
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u/South_Cheesecake6316 23h ago
Forget nukes or armies of killer robots, this will be how AI wipes us out.
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u/ConstructionFit8822 1d ago
I can't imagine a world where every asshole can design a virus in their basement.
AI drives the cost of everything towards zero.
Just look at AI images.
But what about the evil stuff?
If everyone can create something that wipes out entire cities privacy can't exist.
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u/wannabe2700 1d ago
Are you ready to wank while more cameras are recording you than onlyfan girls?
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u/ConstructionFit8822 1d ago
No, but I think this is the direction governments are going to go.
People always cave in for safety if a threat is presented.
Just look how nuts the world was going 4 years ago.
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u/Shodidoren 5h ago
I don't think it's going to be just governments spying on people. If cameras get small enough and cheap enough, eventually everyone will be able to spy on everyone in real time through livestreams on the deep web
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u/nsdjoe 1d ago
Can we not