Tag: proteins
Salesforce project is creating proteins with generative AI
Salesforce Research has been working on an innovative bio-application for artificial intelligence algorithms. ProGen is an AI model designed to create synthetic proteins. It was trained with hundreds of millions of protein sequences in textual form resulting in artificial proteins that are as efficient as the natural ones at removing…
Anti-Microbial Proteins Are Being Developed With AI By… Saleforce?
What do you get when the world’s largest CRM breaks into the research industry and leverages AI to build their products? You get ProGen, a new AI system that can make artificial enzymes from scratch that can work just as well as real ones found in nature. ProGen was made by Salesforce Research (yes, that Salesforce) and uses language processing to learn about biology. In short, ProGen takes amino acid sequences and turns them into proteins….
“The artificial designs are better than ones made by the normal process,” said James Fraser, a scientist involved in the project. “We can now make specific types of enzymes, like ones that work well in hot temperatures or acid.”
To make ProGen, the scientists at Salesforce fed the system amino acid sequences from 280 million different proteins. The AI system quickly made a staggering one million protein sequences, of which 100 were picked to test. Out of these, five were made into actual proteins and tested in cells. That’s just 0.0005% of the generated results….
The code for ProGen is available on Github for anyone who wants to try it (or add to it)
The project shows “how generative AI can lead to potential solutions for addressing challenges in human disease and the environment,” argues a statement form Salesforce.
More details from New Scientist:
The AI, called ProGen, works in a similar way to AIs that can generate text. ProGen learned how to generate new proteins by learning the grammar of how amino acids combine to form 280 million existing proteins. Instead of the researchers choosing a topic for the AI to write about, they could specify a group of similar proteins for it to focus on. In this case, they chose a group of proteins with antimicrobial activity.
The researchers programmed checks into the AI’s process so it wouldn’t produce amino acid “gibberish”, but they also tested a sample of the AI-proposed molecules in real cells. Of the 100 molecules they physically created, 66 participated in chemical reactions similar to those of natural proteins that destroy bacteria in egg whites and saliva. This suggested that these new proteins could also kill bacteria. The researchers selected the five proteins with the most intense reactions and added them to a sample of Escherichia coli bacteria. Two of the proteins destroyed the bacteria.
The researchers then imaged them with X-rays. Even though their amino acid sequences were up to 30% different from any existing proteins, their shapes almost matched naturally occurring proteins. James Fraser at the University of California, San Francisco, who was part of the team, says it was not clear from the outset that the AI could work out how to change the amino acid sequence so much and still produce the correct shape…. He was surprised to have found a well-functioning protein in the first relatively small fraction of all the ProGen-generated proteins that they tested.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Beyond Spike Proteins: Researchers Suggest New Design for Longer Lasting Covid Vaccines:
“Now researchers at the National Institutes of Health in Maryland think they’ve found a new approach to vaccine design that could lead them to a long-lasting jab. As a bonus, it also might work on other coronaviruses, not just the SARS-CoV-2 virus that causes COVID-19.”
The NIH team reported its findings in a peer-reviewed study that appeared in the journal Cell Host & Microbe earlier this month.
The key to the NIH’s potential vaccine design is a part of the virus called the “spine helix.” It’s a coil-shaped structure inside the spike protein, the part of the virus that helps it grab onto and infect our cells. Lots of current vaccines target the spike protein. But none of them specifically target the spine helix. And yet, there are good reasons to focus on that part of the pathogen. Whereas many regions of the spike protein tend to change a lot as the virus mutates, the spine helix doesn’t.
That gives scientists “hope that an antibody targeting this region will be more durable and broadly effective,” Joshua Tan, the lead scientist on the NIH team, told The Daily Beast….
A vaccine that binds the spine helix in SARS-CoV-2 should hold up for a long time. And it should also work on all the other coronaviruses that also include the spine helix — and there are dozens of them, including several such as SARS-CoV-1 and MERS that have already made the leap from animal populations and caused outbreaks in people….
Maybe a spine-helix jab is in our future. Or maybe not. Either way, it’s encouraging that scientists are making incremental progress toward a more universal coronavirus vaccine. One that could work for many years on a wide array of related viruses.
Read more of this story at Slashdot.
Meta claims its AI has predicted the structure of 617m proteins
Meta may have created a rival to AlphaFold, with the company claiming its model can make predictions 60 times faster than other state-of-the-art systems.
Read more: Meta claims its AI has predicted the structure of 617m proteins
Heura tucks into $20M funding chunk for its plant-based proteins ahead of beefier B round next year
What’s going on with demand for plant-based meat? If you take a look at Barcelona-based Heura the picture seems rosy — with the alt-protein startup claiming “non-stop” momentum and a near doubling of revenue from sales of its faux chicken, beef and pork products in the first half of 2022. Mid-year, the 2017-founded startup reports […]
Heura tucks into $20M funding chunk for its plant-based proteins ahead of beefier B round next year by Natasha Lomas originally published on TechCrunch
Best Whey Proteins for Packing on Muscle, Shredding Down, Meal Replacement, and More
Protein is one of the most widely utilized supplements on the market and there is a good reason behind it. Protein is one of the three macronutrients our bodies need in order to function at its highest level. There are several types of proteins to choose from including soy, casein, and the tried and true classic, whey protein. Within … Read more
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