Recently, Qian Long's team at Peking University's Center for Quantitative Biology successfully developed SYMPLEX, the world's first large language model specifically designed for functional gene mining. This innovative model can efficiently screen key genes with specific functions from massive amounts of biological literature, thereby advancing the development of biotechnology.
The advent of SYMPLEX marks a new era for gene mining technology. The team used this model to mine mRNA capping enzyme genes, achieving remarkable results: the newly discovered capping enzyme exhibits significantly higher activity than commercially available enzymes currently used in mRNA vaccine production. This achievement not only demonstrates the immense potential of large language models in biomanufacturing but also provides strong support for future vaccine production.
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Professor Qian Long stated that this research has pioneered a new paradigm for functional gene mining and established a resource library of key enzymes, laying the foundation for the large-scale production of mRNA vaccines. Their goal is to utilize this large model to discover more key enzyme components needed for synthetic biology and plan to expand this platform to broader applications such as synthetic pathway design. It is foreseeable that SYMPLEX will propel biomanufacturing into a new era of "AI-driven scientific research."
Furthermore, the team collaborated with Researcher Lou Chunbo at the Shenzhen Institutes of Advanced Technology, Chinese Academy of Sciences, leveraging SYMPLEX to advance mRNA vaccine technology. This collaboration demonstrates the importance of interdisciplinary research in tackling complex biotechnological challenges, and more similar collaborations are likely to emerge in the future.