16 working viruses, designed by a genome language model

What happened

A team at Stanford and the Arc Institute used the genome language models Evo 1 and Evo 2 to generate roughly 700,000 candidate bacteriophage genomes. They selected 302 for synthesis, successfully built 285, and introduced them into E. coli. Sixteen produced viable phages. Combined into one cocktail, those sixteen cleared two E. coli strains that had already become resistant to a naturally occurring phage. The training data deliberately excluded viruses able to infect humans, animals or plants.