No, it’s not as good a title as Jesse James meets Frankenstein’s Daughter.* But it does pull together two of a our favourite tropes on this little blogsite: human evolution and antibiotic resistance. We won’t spoil the piece from Nature Briefings which you are about to enjoy, gentle readers. But it’s a marvellous example of using AI to squeeze available resources to the limit, in this case the genomes of our close relatives. “Would you Adam and Eve it?” as they used to say in Old Cockney Rhyming slang.
AI Brings Back Neanderthal Protein Snippets
Artificial intelligence (AI) has helped scientists to resurrect Neanderthal peptides — protein subunits that could be an untapped resource of new antibiotics. An algorithm was trained to recognize sites on human proteins where they are cut into peptides. When the algorithm and other tools were applied to publicly available protein sequences of Neanderthals and Denisovans, it found several peptides that halted the growth of certain bacteria in mice.Nature | 5 min read
Reference: Cell Host & Microbe paper
*someone really produced a film with this title
#antibiotics #superbugs #genetics #dna #paleontolgy #evolution
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