
Robot Makes Scientific Discovery All by Itself - peter123
http://blog.wired.com/wiredscience/2009/04/robotscientist.html
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jrockway
Does anyone have more details on this? The article has no actual substance.

If I were to guess, it seems like it's doing something like a genetic
algorithm -- try some things, see which ones do something interesting, try
variations on those. But the article doesn't say.

~~~
codeodor
First, some terminology, w/ an attempt to keep it simple:

1) gene - sequence of DNA that can be used to make proteins 2) enzyme -
protein that acts as a catalyst (hence, the relation to metabolism)

Without having yet read TFA (in /Science/), the meat of the article to me is
this bit:

1) "They armed Adam with a model of yeast metabolism and a database of genes
and proteins involved in metabolism in other species..."

Adam knows what DNA makes up the proteins that are enzymes for yeast
metabolism (start here: <http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/sites/gquery?term=yeast>
and you can probably find such information if you know what to look for)

Then, they selected some proteins involved in metabolism in other species
(also probably able to find that on NCBI). I don't know how far away in the
evolutionary family tree they might have gone with these "other species."

2) "Adam sought out gaps in the metabolism model, specifically orphan enzymes,
which scientists think exist, but which haven't been linked to any parent
genes. After selecting a desirable orphan, Adam scoured the database for
similar enzymes in other organisms, along with the corresponding genes. Using
this information, it hypothesized that similar genes in the yeast genome may
code for the orphan enzyme."

Here it explained that it's not really a hypothesis. Well, it is in the sense
that the hypothesis is 'X gene codes for the orphan enzyme.' Then it could
test it having been programmed to do laboratory work (presumably) to do so.

I say "it's not really a hypothesis" because I would have considered the
hypothesis of the broader experiment to be something along the lines of
'Proteins/Enzymes for whom we don't know which genes code may be coding for
metabolism." Then the experiment is "find all such proteins and test them."

3) "Still chugging along on its own, it designed experiments to test its
hypotheses, and performed them using a fully automated array of centrifuges,
incubators, pipettes, and growth analyzers."

I don't know anything about the lab work, but before this part happens I
gather: a) Adam knows what genes it's looking at (it found them, after all) b)
It looks at those genes being turned into proteins (following the Central
Dogma -
[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biol...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Central_dogma_of_molecular_biology))
c) Using thermodynamics or some aspect of chemistry, it can determine if those
proteins play a role in metabolism.

Hope that helps. I'm still very much a novice at this myself.

------
radu_floricica
I was very surprised first time I realized scientific research is a lot
like... work. Not so much thinking as I imagined, and a lot of other stuff. So
I'm not surprised to find out somebody took a domain where the work can be
automated and did it.

