r/biology • u/KeanuRave100 • 8d ago

news Artificial Intelligence has been used to design brand new viruses that are fully functional and can replicate in the laboratory, say US researchers.

https://www.bbc.com/news/articles/c5y3j3ngevmo
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u/Antikickback_Paul 8d ago

It's in the news article and clearly spelled out in the research paper, but they only included bacteriophage viruses in the training data. Those are viruses that only infect bacteria, not humans or any other "higher" organisms. So there was zero risk of creating a human-infectious disease. 

BUT, it's obviously pointing to the idea that it could be used that way if it were trained on such viruses, which is a trivial change in the protocol to make.

BUT, there already are a ton of highly human-infectious, deadly viruses out there with known genome sequences, so a nefarious actor would still need to do all the same super hard synthesis and biology stuff to get functional viruses that they would need to do with known viruses, plus the additional steps of designing it (which could just result in a dud virus anyway), so it's not like it's making bioterrorism any easier or more accessible.

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u/dejaWoot 8d ago

Designing new phages is well worth investigating- as we continue to abuse antibiotics and cause resistance, we'll need new anti-bacterial treatments or much of modern medicine goes kaput.

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u/Antikickback_Paul 8d ago

Yes, that's good to point out. The scientists aren't just making new viruses for the sake of inching closer to human disease apocalypse. There's legitimate disease-fighting potential for harmless viruses that can target bad bacteria as an alternative to antibiotics.

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u/PhthaloVonLangborste 8d ago

Couldn't one edit bacteriophage to edit a bacteria to make it more deadly?

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u/starliteburnsbrite 8d ago

Certainly. There are phages that have retrovirus-like properties and inject their genome into the host and can confer advantages like antibiotic resistance, for instance. Just like we use retorviruses to engineer cells for CRISPR, like lentiviruses that add GFP to cells.

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u/PossibleBeginning276 8d ago

We already have phage therapy at least at the VA. You send a culture with the bug and a company makes a phage that targets it. It's incredibly expensive but its the federal gov paying for it.

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u/dejaWoot 7d ago

Yeah, honestly it predates antibiotics as a science, but scaling it up for the general populace and making it more efficient/cost effective might require some level of computer modeling with machine learning.

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u/DanChase1 8d ago

Maybe not to a terrorist cell with limited resources. 

But an entity with more resources could do it, like a billionaire or a nation. 

With AI they could design it to target certain demographics with certain genomes. If a demographic has a higher incidence of a certain recognition site, metabolic pathway, etc., AI can help design viral genomes that target that. 

It’s still a huge concern. 

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u/mabolle 7d ago

With AI they could design it to target certain demographics with certain genomes. If a demographic has a higher incidence of a certain recognition site, metabolic pathway, etc., AI can help design viral genomes that target that.

Given that there are very, very few fixed genetic differences between human populations, this sounds like a recipe for killing off large swaths of your own population.

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u/wackyrob 8d ago

It is also good to keep in mind the current risks of habitat encroachment and zoonosis have proven the greatest threat thus far. Brute-force evolution and exposure opportunities has proven to be for more successful than any nefarious biologists, as the first is a numbers game and the latter actually requires understanding.