In recent decades, robots have replaced millions of manual laborers; now they're moving in on scientists, too. Computer scientist Ross King of Aberystwyth University along with systems biologists at the University of Cambridge, U.K., developed a robot named Adam to identify genes involved in yeast metabolism. Adam doesn't look so much like an android as a huge box of Rube Goldberg–type equipment. But it does far more than just analyze cells.
Using algorithms programmed by scientists, Adam formulates hypotheses about the origins of "orphan enzymes": enzymes for which scientists have been unable to identify the encoding genes. The robot then plans and executes experiments to test its hypotheses--selecting yeast mutants from a collection, incubating cells, and measuring their growth rates. As King's team reports this week in Science, Adam came up with 20 hypotheses about genes encoding 13 enzymes, 12 of which it confirmed.
Computer scientist David Waltz says "There's an interesting message from this and perhaps a daunting one for some scientists." In the future, he says, scientists, in order to carry out their work, "might have to learn how to program computers and express knowledge about the world the way people in artificial intelligence have done."
Source: Constance Holden in ScienceNOW Daily News 2 April 2009
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