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Look under the hood of many of this year’s headline-making discoveries in biology and you’ll find machine learning, a tool that’s gaining ground in the life sciences thanks to growing computational power and the availability of big datasets needed for training. Among other advances in 2019, researchers reported successfully using machine learning to screen images for signs of cancer or infection by pathogens, and to identify epigenetic markers in blood samples that are associated with vascular complications in people with diabetes. Check out our special issue on AI for more examples of how the tool is transforming biology.
Even as computers take on more of the tasks once done by hand, engineers are exploring DNA’s capacity to adopt a function usually associated with machines: information storage. This summer, researchers in Boston reported a way of harnessing DNA, together with CRISPR-like base editing machinery, to make ...
