AI Model Evo Designs New Functional Viruses, Some Outperform Natural Counterparts
rohanpaul_ai · x · 2026-08-07
Scientists at the Arc Institute have successfully utilized the AI model Evo to design new viruses that do not exist in nature, with the study published in Science.
- Training Scale: Evo was trained on approximately 9 trillion nucleotides from animals, plants, microbes, and viruses to recognize DNA structural patterns.
- Experiment: Focusing on Phi X-174, a virus that only infects E. coli, the team had Evo generate novel genome designs. Researchers then synthesized 285 of these AI-generated DNA sequences and tested them in bacteria.
- Results: 16 of the designs produced working viruses, with some multiplying faster than the original Phi X-174.
- Safety: To prevent misuse, human-infecting viruses were deliberately excluded from the training data, and none of the resulting viruses can infect humans.
Patrick Cai, a synthetic biologist at the University of Manchester, called the research an important milestone.
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