From oceans to your gut: AI helps researchers understand how viruses act

Protein language models are AI algorithms that are trained to recognize relationships between billions of protein sequences from environments around the world.

Viruses are a mysterious and poorly understood force in microbial ecosystems. Researchers know they can infect, kill and manipulate human and bacterial cells in nearly every environment, from the oceans to your gut. But scientists don’t yet have a full picture of how viruses affect their surrounding environments in large part because of their extraordinary diversity and ability to rapidly evolve.