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| How planarians regenerate and propagate, know known! Image credit |
Planarians have always been a model organism for genetic
work in aging and body structure. However, biologists have always struggled to find
all the genes that cause these flatworms to regenerate from just a sliver of
their former selves. Biologists have the genes responsible for it, but figuring
out how these genes manage to regenerate the planarian perfectly is still
rather fuzzy.
Daniel Lobo and Michael Levin decided to tackle this problem
in a novel way: they gave it to an artificial intelligence system. And it succeeded
in finding it, something biologists have been stumped for over 100 years.
This is the first time a non-human intelligence investigated
a biological mechanism, and it opens an interesting question: will robots
replace scientists? The answer is likely no, they will not. But, they will be a
very useful aid. For example, Lobo and Levin’s AI arrived at its answer via
trial and error after 3 days, with input gathered from genetics studies on the
planarian’s regenerative system. At the speed a computer can run, it can do
things that would be very tedious and inefficient for a human.
It would be exciting to see how this can be applied to
similar studies in genetics, and helping science much like climatological
models help us today.
For a link to the study done by Levin and Lobo, click here
For a link to the full article, click here
