Powerful antibiotics discovered through artificial intelligence
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Bacterial resistance to antibiotics is increasing dramatically worldwide and it is expected that resistant infections will kill ten million people a year in 2050.
This team of researchers has developed a neural network that learns the properties of the molecules atom by atom.
The researchers trained the neural network with 2335 molecules that were known to be antibacterial, to detect molecules that inhibited the growth of E. coli bacteria.
After using it with a few thousand more molecules, among all the results they obtained a molecule that turned out to be an effective antibiotic and which they called "Halina", in honor of the HAL 9000 computer of 2001 A space odyssey.
No doubt with the fusion of artificial intelligence and biology we will see amazing things.
Source: nature.com, read original article
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-020-00018-3