A natural language model has jumpstarted the process of protein design by creating active enzymes.

Researchers have developed an AI system that can generate artificial enzymes from scratch. In laboratory experiments, some of these enzymes demonstrated efficacy comparable to natural enzymes, even when their artificially created amino acid sequences greatly deviated from any known natural protein.

The experiment shows that natural language processing, initially created for reading and writing language text, can grasp certain fundamental concepts of biology. The AI program, known as ProGen, was developed by Salesforce Research and employs next-token prediction to construct artificial proteins from amino acid sequences.