In recent decades, robots have replaced millions of manual laborers; now they’re moving in on scientists, too. A fully automated robotic laboratory can design its posses molecular biology experiments as well as has even made its first discoveries, a multidisciplinary team reports this week. Meanwhile, a team of computer scientists has developed a robot that can independently come up with the “laws of motion” on behalf of a dynamical system such as interconnected pendulums.
Robots are doing ever more of the physical labor in laboratories–from analyzing DNA samples to handling data tapes from massive particle-physics experiments. And scientists increasingly rely on computers to analyze their data. But the highest-level thinking–the formulation of hypotheses as well as designing of experiments to test them–has remained the preserve of humans.
That’s starting to modification with the efforts of computer scientist Ross King of Aberystwyth University in conjunction with systems biologists at the University of Cambridge, U.K., who have developed a robot named Adam to identify genes involved in yeast metabolism. Adam doesn’t look so much like an android as a huge box of Rube Goldberg–type equipment. But it does far more than just analyze cells.
Using algorithms programmed by scientists, Adam formulates hypotheses about the origins of “orphan enzymes”: enzymes on behalf of which scientists have been not in a position to identify the encoding genes. The robot then plans as well as executes experiments to test its hypotheses–selecting yeast mutants from a collection, incubating cells, as well as measuring their growth rates. As King’s team reports this week in Science, Adam came up with 20 hypotheses about genes encoding 13 enzymes, 12 of which it confirmed.
via Robotic Scientists Make First Discoveries — Holden 2009 (402): 1 — ScienceNOW.