Robot Scientist Creates and Evaluates Microbiology Hypotheses

Jean-Claude Bradley — Sun, 04 May 2008 12:09:59 -0700

Description

From Ross King's Robot Scientist web site (1):

The Robot Scientist is perhaps the first physical implementation of the task of Scientific Discovery in a microbiology laboratory. It represents the merging of increasingly automated and remotely controllable laboratory equipment and knowledge discovery techniques from Artificial Intelligence.

Automation of laboratory equipment (the "Robot" of Robot Scientist) has revolutionised laboratory practice by removing the "drudgery" of constructing many wet lab experiments by hand, allowing an increase in both the scope and scale of potential experiments. Most lab robots only require a simple description of the various chemical/ biological entities to be used in the experiments, along with their required volumes and where these entities are stored. Automation has also given rise to significantly increased productivity and a concomitant increase in the production of results and data requiring interpretation, giving rise to an "interpretation bottleneck" where the process of understanding the results is lagging behind the production of results.

The research fields of Computational Scientific Discovery and Bioinformatics have emerged in part as a response to this bottleneck. Both disciplines use computational approaches from Statistics and Machine Learning to provide an "automated understanding" of the experimental results.

This is a strong signal foreshadowing the near automation of the entire scientific process. This robot is able to function within the framework of molecular biology. However, each field has its own set of opportunities and challenges. The difficulty in extending this concept to other fields, such as organic (2) or inorganic chemistry will depend upon the conceptual models used. Providing the system with fewer human-based rules about how chemistry works would make it more difficult but ultimately could be more interesting.

Coupled with the practice of Open Data (3) and Crowdsourcing (4), a new form of distributed scientific intelligence could emerge that would "understand" reality in the sense that it is predictive and able to control phenomena but not in a way that is necessarily intuitive to humans.

This may be a pathway to the technological singularity.(5)

Future of chemistry

Source

1) http://www.aber.ac.uk/compsci/Research/bio/robotsci/intro/
2) http://sciencex2.org/en/node/16263
3) http://sciencex2.org/en/node/15726
4) http://precedings.nature.com/documents/1505/version/1
5) http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Technological_singularity

Manufactured Buckyballs don't harm microbes that clean the environment

Matt Daniels — Fri, 18 Apr 2008 09:09:40 -0700

Description

Even large amounts of manufactured nanoparticles, also known as Buckyballs, don't faze microscopic organisms that are charged with cleaning up the environment, according to Purdue University researchers.

From PhysOrg:

In the first published study to examine Buckyball toxicity on microbes that break down organic substances in wastewater, the scientists used an amount of the nanoparticles on the microbes that was equivalent to pouring 10 pounds of talcum powder on a person. Because high amounts of even normally safe compounds, such as talcum powder, can be toxic, the microbes' resiliency to high Buckyball levels was an important finding, the Purdue investigators said.

The experiment on Buckyballs, which are carbon molecules C60, also led the scientists to develop a better method to determine the impact of nanoparticles on the microbial community.

"It's important to look at the entire microbial community when nanomaterials are introduced because the microbes are all interdependent for survival and growth," said Leila Nyberg, a doctoral student in the School of Civil Engineering and the study's lead author. "If we see a minor change in these microorganisms it could negatively impact ecosystems."

The microbes used in the study live without oxygen and also exist in subsurface soil and the stomachs of ruminant animals, such as cows and goats, where they aid digestion.

"We found no effect by any amount of C60 on the structure or the function of the microbial community over a short time," Nyberg said. "Based on what we know about the properties of C60, this is a realistic model of what would happen if high concentrations of nanoparticles were released into the environment."

Physics & Space Science

Source

http://www.physorg.com/news126891041.html