This article has been reviewed according to Science X's editorial process and policies. Editors have highlighted the following attributes while ensuring the content's credibility: Tiny viruses that infect bacteria could one day help us tackle infections that antibiotics can no longer treat. But first, scientists need to understand how these viruses work, and artificial intelligence could provide them with a powerful way to do that.
Known as bacteriophages, or simply phages, these viruses infect bacteria and use them to make more copies of themselves. There are thought to be more phages on Earth than any other type of biological entity, and they have spent billions of years evolving ways to find bacteria, invade them and overcome their defenses. This extraordinary diversity could be a boon for medicine.
Some phages are already being investigated as treatments for bacterial infections, but finding the right virus for the right infection is not straightforward. Scientists need to understand why one phage can infect a particular bacterium while another cannot, why some can overcome bacterial defenses and why some work better than others in the complex environment of the human body. The idea is no longer purely theoretical.
In a new study, published in the journal Science, researchers at Stanford University used AI to design the DNA of a complete phage. When the synthetic DNA was built in the laboratory, it produced a functioning virus—an important demonstration that AI can learn enough about a biological system to design something that works in the real world. For scientists who study phages, though, the more interesting question is what comes next.
If AI can learn enough to build a phage, could it help us understand how these remarkable viruses work? The Stanford researchers started with ΦX174, a bacteriophage that infects the bacterium E. coli. It is one of the smallest, simplest and best-studied phages known to science.
That makes ΦX174 a good test case for showing that an AI-designed genome can be built and used to create a viable phage. But it's a long way from the much more complicated phages that scientists are interested in developing as medicines. Some potentially useful therapeutic phages are five to 50 times larger than ΦX174.
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