Monday, May 08, 2023

AI could run a million microbial experiments per year, says study

Good news! Huge potential! Note these experiments are based on unsupervised learning! Almost like child's play!

"An artificial intelligence system enables robots to conduct autonomous scientific experiments—as many as 10,000 per day—potentially driving a drastic leap forward in the pace of discovery in areas from medicine to agriculture to environmental science. ...
That artificial intelligence platform, dubbed BacterAI, mapped the metabolism of two microbes associated with oral health—with no baseline information to start with. Bacteria consume some combination of the 20 amino acids needed to support life, but each species requires specific nutrients to grow. The U-M team wanted to know what amino acids are needed by the beneficial microbes in our mouths so they can promote their growth.
"We know almost nothing about most of the bacteria that influence our health. Understanding how bacteria grow is the first step toward reengineering our microbiome," ...
Unlike conventional approaches that feed labeled data sets into a machine-learning model, BacterAI creates its own data set through a series of experiments. By analyzing the results of previous trials, it comes up with predictions of what new experiments might give it the most information. As a result, it figured out most of the rules for feeding bacteria with fewer than 4,000 experiments. ..."

From the abstract:
"Training artificial intelligence (AI) systems to perform autonomous experiments would vastly increase the throughput of microbiology; however, few microbes have large enough datasets for training such a system. In the present study, we introduce BacterAI, an automated science platform that maps microbial metabolism but requires no prior knowledge. BacterAI learns by converting scientific questions into simple games that it plays with laboratory robots. The agent then distils its findings into logical rules that can be interpreted by human scientists. We use BacterAI to learn the amino acid requirements for two oral streptococci: Streptococcus gordonii and Streptococcus sanguinis. We then show how transfer learning can accelerate BacterAI when investigating new environments or larger media with up to 39 ingredients. Scientific gameplay and BacterAI enable the unbiased, autonomous study of organisms for which no training data exist."

AI could run a million microbial experiments per year, says study

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