this artificially manufactured virus is a bacteriaphage to eat E Coli. Wapost explains:
or if you don't have the money to get past their wall you can read it at CIDRAP:
,,, researchers from Stanford University and the Broad Institute report that the functional bacteriophages they created using artificial intelligence (AI) rapidly destroyed strains of Escherichia coli that had evolved resistance to naturally occurring phages, but experts call for safeguards to prevent the technology from being used for harm.
Bacteriophages are ubiquitous viruses that target, infect, and kill only bacteria. They are found everywhere bacteria live, including the environment and the human gut, and they can be used to treat bacterial infections.
... “Even the simplest genomes are highly complex and can be rendered nonviable by a single mutation,” the authors wrote. “Design at the scale of whole genomes has remained largely beyond reach.”
Urgent biosafety, biosecurity questions
....In an accompanying commentary, Thomas Inglesby, MD, and Moritz Hanke, MD, both of Johns Hopkins University, warn that although the finding is promising, “it also raises urgent biosafety and biosecurity questions. The ability to compose viral genomes using generative AI now exists; the governance to safely steer it does not.”
They caution that this technology could be used to create non-therapeutic bacteriophages in eukaryotes such as humans, animals, and plants.
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