Describe the protein you need, in plain words — this AI designs it

Protein design used to mean months of geometry. A team at China's Westlake University has built Pinal, an AI that starts from a sentence: describe the job you want a protein to do, and it proposes candidates shaped for the task. Published in Nature, the system learned from 135 million protein sequences organised into 1.7 billion protein-and-text pairs. The team tested it on four jobs — a fluorescent protein, a plastic-breaking enzyme, an alcohol-processing enzyme and a metabolic protein — and its best design for that last one boosted the output of a key carbon-capturing process to 1.7 times the natural version. The researchers are candid that most candidates still fail and precise control is hard; the direction, though, is plain to see.

SDG 9 · Industry, innovation and infrastructure — Mechanism: tech innovation