Machine learning and artificial intelligence are all the rage today in venture capital circles…What happens when machine learning meets biology?
Berkeley-based Lygos is engineering and designing microbes that convert low-cost sugar into high-value, specialty chemicals…In other words, the latest advances in software, big data, machine learning, biotech, and chemistry may be combining to quite possibly start a new industrial revolution.
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Microbes have evolved over millions of years to become hyper-efficient factories. A microbe has amazing computational and machine learning ability because so much is written into the genetic code. Evolution is nature’s machine learning algorithm.
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Lygos is unlocking the ability to control and guide evolution to reprogram a microbe to produce its products. A microbe can do a computation every time it divides and grows itself, which it does every 20 minutes. Lygos has millions of them going in a single vat at a time. Using technology that harnesses evolution, they have a more powerful machine-learning platform in nature than a computer could ever deliver, and are developing and deploying a range of these technologies to design microbial factories.
The GLP aggregated and excerpted this blog/article to reflect the diversity of news, opinion, and analysis. Read full, original post: Machine learning and microbes: How big data is redefining biotechnology
