[jhbadger]

I think you are missing what the Evo project is trying to do -- create a new prokaryotic genome through a generative model. How this would work would be like the earlier hand-made synthetic genomes like Synthia (Gibson et al, 2010).

In such a system you would take an existing bacterial cell and replace its genome with the newly synthesized version. The proteins and other molecules from the existing cell would remain (before eventually being replaced) and serve to "boot" the new genome.

[pfisherman]

Sounds cool, but how you define success for something like that? I can copy a prokaryotic genome mutated based as some non-zero rate and it would probably be viable. Is that synthetic enough to count? Are they going for a minimal genome?

How about something more useful, lucrative, and easy to define success for like engineering a morphine synthesis pathway into E. coli or something.

Imo, if you are talking about synthetic biology, then their training data is insufficient. Synthetic bio explores a lot of design space that is far outside of anything you would see in nature. There the secret sauce would not be in the generative pretraining, but in the RL. Unfortunately bio experiments are noisy, slow, and expensive so good luck getting enough data before the heat death of the universe.

[nextos]

It's an interesting endeavor, but there are some obvious safety concerns.

Within Prokaryotes, there is a lot of horizontal gene transfer. What if some of the synthetic sequences get into other organisms and spread out?

[_yb2s]

Those genes would have to confer an evolutionary advantage or they would immediately be discarded/selected against. The chances of that happening are nil… we’re not going to come up with something more useful to bacteria than billions of years of natural selection. Synthetic biology with organisms produced to generate small molecules useful for humans is widely practiced but has the opposite problem- all of the engineering changes to the cells are constantly being selected against, and revert on their own.