Amazing stuff! This could be a breakthrough!
"... Researchers ... used an AI model called Evo 2 to design 16 viable bacteriophages, that is, viruses that infect bacteria—the first time AI has generated whole living genomes. ..."
"Scientists have created the first ever viruses designed by artificial intelligence (AI), and they’re capable of hunting down and killing strains of Escherichia coli (E. coli). ..."
From the abstract:
"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."
How We Built the First AI-Generated Genomes (original news release)
World’s first AI-designed viruses a step towards AI-generated life (partial open access) "Scientists used AI to write coherent viral genomes, using them to synthesize bacteriophages capable of killing resistant strains of bacteria."
Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models (preprint, open access)
"Going from designing individual genes to complete genomes is an incredibly challenging problem. We have previously shown that the genomic foundation models like the Evo series can generate single proteins and multi-component systems like CRISPR-Cas complexes or protein-protein interactions. However, even before we developed Evo, one of our longstanding goals has been to design a complete, functional genome with a biological language model."
"The genome of ΦX174 is also historically significant. In 1977, it was the first complete genome ever sequenced by Fred Sanger and colleagues. In 2003, it was the first whole genome ever chemically synthesized, proving that genomes could be assembled from scratch, by Craig Venter and colleagues. Now, in 2025, we have used ΦX174 as a template to produce the first AI-generated genomes. This progression represents the fundamental capabilities that define modern genomics: we learned to read DNA, then to write it, and now to design it."
Fig. 1 Evo composes realistic bacteriophage genomic sequences.
Fig. 2 Generative design of novel bacteriophages with target host tropism.
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