Known to mankind a few thousand different viruses and are regularly discovered new (including dangerous to humans). However, artificial intelligence was able to find as many as 6,000 previously unknown viruses. And he found them where the person to look for would be very problematic.
Currently, scientists are increasingly looking for viruses using DNA sequencing. The fact that many viruses are “almost dead” merged with cellular structures and to detect them in pure form is extremely difficult. For identification of viruses, scientists use genetic signatures of known viruses and bacteria. The researchers for clarity, compare your method with search function within a text document when we are looking for individual words and letters. But in this way, there is one problem: scientists can’t look for what they know, and discovered thus viruses are often accidental discovery. But artificial intelligence can work around this problem. As noted by Jie Ren, a computational biologist from the University of southern California in Los Angeles
“Before, people had no way to quickly and in detail to study the viruses. But now we have the tools to find them. We trained a neural network to identify the genetic sequence of viruses from an unusual family Inoviridae. These viruses live in bacteria and alters the behavior of the master.”
The experts have collected vast amount of data about the genome, and the AI restored more than 10 000 genes Inoviridae and grouped them. About 6,000 of the detected fragments were previously unknown to science. Moreover, each such fragment can exist apart from the rest. Experts say that this discovery will become a new tool for studying the diversity of viruses on our planet.
Artificial intelligence found 6,000 new viruses
Vladimir Kuznetsov