In a new preprint from @brianhie.bsky.social's lab, the team reports the first generative design of viable bacteriophage genomes. Leveraging Evo 1 & Evo 2, they generated whole genome sequences, resulting in 16 viable phages with distinct genomic architectures.

A landmark paper from Brian Hie’s group at the Arc Institute. The de novo design of the synthetic genome of an entirely novel biological entity www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

Genome foundation models, Evo 1 and Evo 2, have now generated viable bacteriophage genomes, demonstrating experimental validation of whole genomes designed by AI! @arcinstitute.org @brianhie.bsky.social @samuelhking.bsky.social Read more at GEN: www.genengnews.com/topics/artif...

Many of the most complex and useful functions in biology emerge at the scale of whole genomes. Today, we share our preprint “Generative design of novel bacteriophages with genome language models”, where we validate the first, functional AI-generated genomes 🧵

We trained a genomic language model on all observed evolution, which we are calling Evo 2. The model achieves an unprecedented breadth in capabilities, enabling prediction and design tasks from molecular to genome scale and across all three domains of life.

Excited to have the first project of my PhD out!! By leveraging genomic language model Evo’s ability to learn relationships across genes (i.e., "know a gene by the company it keeps"), we show that we can use prompt-engineering to generate highly divergent proteins with retained functionality. 🧵1/N