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EVE THE SCIENTIST. "Eve is a prototype system to demonstrate the automation of closed-loop learning in drug-screening and design. Eve's robotic system is capable of moderately high-throughput compound screening (greater than 10,000 compounds per day) and is designed to be flexible enough such that it can be rapidly re-configured to carry out a number of different biological assays." https://lnkd.in/dHmK73K View in LinkedIn

FRAGMENT FROM NATURE continues from last weekend and concludes this weekend on the theme of horizontal gene transfer. Although first described in the 1930s, it was not taken very seriously by biologists until about 1999, when it was increasingly realized that it played an important role in the evolution of many, if not all creatures. And that the main agents of this gene transfer were bacteria, jumping genes, and virus-like agents. Now it is accepted by the mainstream. https://lnkd.in/deYxkt5 View in LinkedIn

HYPOTHESIS TESTING. "Adam conceived 20 hypotheses concerning the identity of genes encoding 13 locally orphan enzymes in S. cerevisiae. Adam tested all these hypotheses on its robotic system and was able to confirm by experimentation, with a high degree of confidence, the correctness of 12 of them." https://lnkd.in/dHmK73K View in LinkedIn

"EVER WANTED TO have a robot to do your research for you? If you are a scientist, you have almost certainly had this dream. Now it’s a real option: Eureqa, a program that distills scientific laws from raw data, is freely available to researchers." https://lnkd.in/dEC3j_P View in LinkedIn

ADAM & EVE. "Towards Robot Scientists for autonomous scientific discovery. We describe our two prototype Robot Scientists: Adam and Eve. Adam has recently proven the potential of such systems by identifying twelve genes responsible for catalysing specific reactions in the metabolic pathways of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae. This work has been formally recorded in great detail using logic." https://lnkd.in/dHmK73K View in LinkedIn

CURIOUSER AND CURIOUSER. "Acquisition of the mitochondria precipitated the series of dramatic changes in the organization of the chimeric cell which led to the curtailment of HGT." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

FITS AND STARTS. "Eukaryotes acquired the majority of bacterial genes in the two major bursts associated with the origin of mitochondria and chloroplasts whereas subsequent, continuous acquisition of bacterial genes was limited in extent." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

GIANT GENE TRANSFERS. "In these special cases, the sources of the hundreds if not thousands of transferred genes were mitochondria and chloroplasts, respectively, i.e. bacterial endosymbionts on the path to becoming eukaryotic organelles." https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

ESTABLISHED FACT. "The importance of massive HGT in at least two major evolutionary transitions, namely the origin of eukaryotes and the origin of the eukaryotic supergroup Archaeplastida (algae and plants), is beyond doubt." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn

MASSIVE TRANSITIONS. "These observations prompted the hypothesis that emergence of new major groups of organisms often, perhaps typically, involves massive gene gain via HGT (in microbes) or extensive, in some cases, whole genome duplication (in eukaryotes) followed by gradual genome streamlining via gene loss in each of the lineages." (HGT = horizontal gene transfer). https://lnkd.in/dSemZpD View in LinkedIn