Get the latest tech news

Scientists Just Discovered Over 70,000 Bizarre New Viruses With AI

Charting the "dark matter" of the viral universe has implications not just for biotechnology—but potentially for battling the next pandemic too.

Most viral genetic material is biological “dark matter,” Mang Shi at Sun Yat-sen University and colleagues recently wrote in a new paper published in Cell. Scientists have previously used AI to fish out potential new RNA viruses from petabytes of genetic sequencing data —an amount roughly equivalent to 500 million high-resolution photos. The first channel uses a transformer-based model, similar to ChatGPT, to extract amino acid sequence “keywords” encoding viral RdRPs from a large database.

Get the Android app