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.
Reported today in Nature Microbiology, the team was led by a professor now at the University of Michigan.
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.
Read more at: University of Michigan
Paul Jensen, Assistant Professor at University of Michigan Biomedical Engineering and his graduate students have created an artificial intelligence agent that uses game-playing robots to answer scientific questions. BacterAI can assign autonomous scientific experiments for robots that eventually lead to answers that would normally take humans years to answer. Their Deep Phenotyping system has completed 931,038 automated experiments since January 2020. Photo Credit: Marcin Szczepanski/Lead Multimedia Storyteller, Michigan Engineering)