• Email Bluesky Facebook LinkedIn Reddit Whatsapp X Chatbot-driven lab robots are automating methods like protein synthesis.Credit: Du Yu/Xinhua via Alamy Last year, synthetic biologist Meagan Olsen performed the biggest experimental campaign of her career. • The PhD student at Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, was trying to make proteins in a test tube more efficiently. • Across more than 40 experiments over 4 months, she tested 1,231 combinations of sugars, amino acids and other ingredients, including cellular machinery, before landing on a cocktail that was at least six-times cheaper than existing cell-free protein synthesis recipes1. • Now, an ‘autonomous laboratory’ system made up of a large language model (LLM) ‘scientist’, lab robotics that automate simple tasks such as liquid transfer and human overseers created by scientists at artificial-intelligence firm OpenAI in San Francisco, California, and Ginkgo Bioworks, a biotechnology company in Cambridge, Massachusetts, has eclipsed Olsen’s record. • It achieved a further 40% reduction in cost, after testing more than 30,000 experimental conditions over 6 months2. • The findings - described in a paper posted on the bioRxiv preprint server on 5 February - have sparked discussion over the extent to which chatbot-controlled robots could replace humans.
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