In 2008, researchers reported the first ever synthetic genome of a living organism, which was produced by chemically synthesizing the 580,000-nucleotide genome of the bacterium Mycoplasma genitalium1 . Follow-up work 'rebooted' such genomes in cells, creating what scientists claimed to be the first example of synthetic life2. Now, researchers have used artificial intelligence to design whole genome sequences, including one inspired by that of M. genitalium. The AI model is trained on trillions of DNA letters from organisms across the tree of life. Although impressive, the genome designs ' included in a Nature paper, published on 4 March, describing the Evo2 DNA language model used to create them3 ' are just one step towards creating AI-generated microbial life, say other researchers. 'It's cool, but it's not there yet,' says Nico Claassens, a synthetic biologist at Wageningen University in the Netherlands. The need to synthesize and test AI-generated genomes at scale is one major...
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