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| Robot Scientist First Machine To Discover New Scientific Knowledge |
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| SciMed - Horizons | ||||||
| TS-Si News Service | ||||||
| Monday, 06 April 2009 16:00 | ||||||
 Aberystwyth, Wales, UK. Adam is a computer system that fully automates the scientific process. Scientists at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge designed Adam to carry out each stage of the scientific process automatically without the need for further human intervention. The robot scientist is now believed to be the first machine to have independently discovered new scientific knowledge.Adam discovered simple but new scientific knowledge about the
 genomics of the baker's yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae, an organism that scientists use to model more complex life systems. The researchers used separate manual experiments to confirm that Adam's hypotheses were both novel and correct. The work appears in the journal Science.
Using artificial intelligence, Adam hypothesised that certain genes in baker's yeast code for specific enzymes which catalyse biochemical reactions in yeast. The robot then devised experiments to test these predictions, ran the experiments using laboratory robotics, interpreted the results and repeated the cycle.
The Robot Scientists are multidisciplinary research projects involving expertise from Computer Science and Microbiology, and are projects of the Computational Biology research group at Aberystwyth.
The team currently has two Robot Scientists. Adam investigates yeast functional genomics.
Adam is still a protoype. Prof Ross King, the team leader, believes that the next robot, Eve, holds great promise. Eve's investigates drug screening and could assist scientists searching for new drugs to combat diseases such as malaria and schistosomiasis, an infection caused by a type of parasitic worm in the tropics.
Prof King continued: "If science was more efficient it would be better placed to help solve society's problems. One way to make science more efficient is through automation. Automation was the driving force behind much of the 19th and 20th century progress, and this is likely to continue."
Prof. Douglas Kell is Chief Executive of the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC). He says that "Computers play a fundamental role in the scientific process, which is becoming increasingly automated, for instance in drug design and
DNA sequencing." This has led to more scientific data, increasingly available on the web, which requires increased use of computers to analyse these data.
 Prof. Ross King, who led the research at Aberystwyth, said: "Ultimately we hope to have teams of human and robot scientists working together in laboratories.""Because biological organisms are so complex it is important that the details of biological experiments are recorded in great detail. This is difficult and irksome for human scientists, but easy for Robot Scientists."
Robot scientists could provide a useful tool for managing such data and knowledge, making scientific procedures easier and more efficient. This kind of learning will become even more important as we move further towards integrative and predictive biology in the era of Web 2.0 and the Semantic Web," says Kell.
Summary of ProcedureA yeast library plate is taken out of the freezer. Various strains are stab-picked from this frozen plate and used to inoculate a plate containing rich medium. This plate is transferred into an incubator and grown for approx 24 hours to recover. The plate then undergoes liquid handling to normalise cell densities in a defined medium and add metabolites. Finally there is an incubate-shake-read cycle to take growth measurements for approximately 3 days.
FundingThe research was funded by the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council (BBSRC).
CitationThe Automation of Science. Ross D. King, Jem Rowland, Stephen G. Oliver, Michael Young, Wayne Aubrey, Emma Byrne, Maria Liakata, Magdalena Markham, Pinar Pir, Larisa N. Soldatova, Andrew Sparkes, Kenneth E. Whelan, and Amanda Clare. Science 2009; 324 (5923): 85-89. doi: 10.1126/science.1165620.
Abstract The basis of science is the hypothetico-deductive method and the recording of experiments in sufficient detail to enable reproducibility. We report the development of Robot Scientist "Adam," which advances the automation of both. Adam has autonomously generated functional genomics hypotheses about the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae and experimentally tested these hypotheses by using laboratory automation. We have confirmed Adam's conclusions through manual experiments. To describe Adam's research, we have developed an ontology and logical language. The resulting formalization involves over 10,000 different research units in a nested treelike structure, 10 levels deep, that relates the 6.6 million biomass measurements to their logical description. This formalization describes how a machine contributed to scientific knowledge.  The TS-Si News Service is a collaborative effort by TS-Si.org editors, contributors, and corresponding institutions. Sources can include the cited individuals and organizations, as well as TS-Si.org staff contributions. Articles and news reports do not necessarily convey official positions of TS-Si, its partners, or affiliates. We welcome your comments. Use the form below to leave a public comment or send private correspondence via the TS-Si Contact Page. We will not divulge any personal details or place you on a mailing list without your permission.TS-Si is dedicated to the acceptance, medical treatment, and legal protection of individuals correcting the misalignment of their brains and their anatomical sex, while supporting their transition into society as hormonally reconstituted and surgically corrected citizens.
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