Using artificial intelligence (AI), scientists have designed synthetic DNA to control gene expression and thus control the cells' production of proteins.
Most drugs and vaccines that are developed today are protein-based. However, the techniques to produce them are slow and expensive, because it is difficult to control how the DNA is expressed. AI that has been taught the structure and regulatory code of DNA can be programmed to design a specific DNA sequence, which gives scientists the ability to control gene expression, and thus control the production of particular proteins – speeding up the development of protein-based drugs.
'First it was about being able to fully "read" the DNA molecule's instructions. Now we have succeeded in designing our own DNA that contains the exact instructions to control the quantity of a specific protein', said Dr Aleksej Zelezniak, associate professor at Chalmers University of Technology, Sweden, and senior lecturer at King's College London.
In all living organisms' cells, a process called transcription takes place – the process of making an RNA copy (mRNA) of a gene's DNA sequence, which carries information regarding which proteins to produce and in what quantities.
Scientists at Chalmers University of Technology have used a state-of-the-art machine learning approach to help them understand and control how much of a protein is made from a certain DNA sequence. Publishing their findings in Nature Communications, the researchers developed AI to design synthetic DNA with the exact information for gene expression to produce the desired amount of protein required for drug development.
'DNA is an incredibly long and complex molecule. It is thus experimentally extremely challenging to make changes to it by iteratively reading and changing it, then reading and changing it again. This way it takes years of research to find something that works,' said first author Dr Jan Zrimec, a research associate at the National Institute of Biology, Slovenia. 'Instead, it is much more effective to let an AI learn the principles of navigating DNA. What otherwise takes years is now shortened to weeks or days'.
The researchers hope that this method will improve drug and vaccine development – making it faster and cheaper. By understanding the genetic code behind the production of specific proteins it is possible to teach the body's immune system to form antibodies against viruses and other complex diseases, such as cancer.
The method has been developed in the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, as the yeast cells resemble mammalian cells. The scientist's next step is to use human cells.
Leave a Reply
You must be logged in to post a comment.