With artificial intelligence (AI), scientists have a powerful new tool for creating never-before-seen proteins, which can be used to make either groundbreaking new medicines or devastating bioweapons.
To help guard against nefarious uses of these proteins, scientists have recently figured out a way to "watermark" them without compromising their function. A team from Google DeepMind developed this technique to better track the provenance of AI-designed proteins.
"This has the potential to reduce biosecurity threats, such as unauthorized toxin creation, and may help with database curation, preventing artificial designs from cluttering the standard databases," said Roy Sleator, a biology professor at Munster Technological University in Ireland, who was not involved in the research.
"In practice, it could help trace a design's origin, flag engineered proteins for extra biosecurity checks, and reduce misleading ...
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