To say that someone has ‘good hands’ is high praise in a molecular biology laboratory, where researchers must deftly handle delicate glassware, pipette samples and more. But in an unusual genetics lab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, a team of robots driven by artificial intelligence is designing and doing experiments with no hands to speak of.
The facility, described today1 in Nature, is one of the latest steps towards ‘self-driving’ labs that are guided by AI, with minimal input from human scientists. With samples moved around by robotic arms, the Shanghai lab can operate more than 20 types of instrument, complete thousands of operations in a single project and do experiments that involve synthesizing and sequencing DNA, among other tasks.
An experiment is designed and executed from start to finish by a team of AI agents, following a simple prompt from a human operator. After that, human hands are needed only to refresh reagents and to service hardware.
The system, called AutoDNA, is remarkable both for its degree of autonomy and because it can readily incorporate a diverse range of lab equipment, says Milad Abolhasani, a chemical engineer at North Carolina State University in Raleigh. “The future of science is going to involve a lot of autonomous labs.”
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