Researchers at the University of Illinois Urbana Champaign, led by Professor Huimin Zhao, have developed a powerful AI driven, automated platform to accelerate enzyme improvement. By combining artificial intelligence, robotics, and synthetic biology, the team created a "self driving lab" that designs, builds, and tests enzymes with minimal human input.

The system uses AI to predict beneficial mutations based on enzyme sequences, while robotic tools at the university’s iBioFoundry produce and test the variants. Test results are then fed back into the AI to refine future designs, creating a closed loop, highly efficient workflow.

Using this approach, the team dramatically enhanced the performance of two key industrial enzymes one used in animal feed with 26 fold increased activity, and another used in chemical synthesis with 16 times greater activity and 90 times better target specificity.

The method is generalizable to a wide range of enzymes and features a user friendly interface that allows researchers to operate the system using simple English prompts. The work, supported by the National Science Foundation and U.S. Department of Energy, was published in Nature Communications and represents a major step toward fully automated biological research.

Source: https://bioengineering.illinois.edu/news/self-driving-lab