Researchers at Salesforce Research have created an AI program, called ProGen, capable of producing functional enzymes. ProGen was fed the amino acid sequences of 280 million different proteins and after fine-tuning, it generated a million sequences from which the research team selected 100 to test. Two of the artificial enzymes were able to break down bacterial cell walls and showed activity even when as little as 31.4% of their sequence was similar to any known natural protein. ProGen was developed in 2020, based on an AI system designed to generate English language text. The development of ProGen is seen as a major step forward in the field of protein engineering and could lead to new proteins for use in therapy or plastic degradation.
Source: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41587-022-01618-2
