In Other News · United States · Technology

Source: Axios

Mark Zuckerberg's Biohub is partnering with Google and the federal government in its ambitious effort to use AI for generating vast quantities of biological data that can predict how cells behave.Why it matters: The ultimate goal is an AI model that lets scientists test potential experiments virtually, helping them identify the most promising ones before spending the time and money to perform them in the lab.AI is capable of understanding proteins and other pieces of biology, but modeling an entire living cell is orders of magnitude more complex — and researchers don't yet have enough of the right data to do it.Driving the news: Biohub, the Department of Energy, the National Institutes of Health, Google DeepMind, Isomorphic Labs, Meta and a collection of scientific organizations are collaborating to create and standardize data for what Biohub calls a "universal virtual cell."The big picture: The goal is to use AI to explore many more scientific questions in biology virtually, allowing scientists to reserve expensive lab work for experiments most likely to teach them something important."If we can put more and more reasoning and intelligence into every single question that we actually ask in the lab, the value of those empirical results will...