AiGEM
Artificial intelligence for Genetic Evolution Mimicking
![](https://static.igem.org/mediawiki/2017/b/ba/T--Heidelberg--2017_AiGEM_GA.jpg)
To simplify the generation desired functionalities de novo and enable evolutionary leaps, we created AiGEM, our Artificial Intelligence for Genetic Evolution Mimicking software suite. The heart of our software is DeeProtein, a deep neuronal network trained on ~10 million protein sequences and able to infer sequence-function relationships from raw sequence data with high accuracy. By interfacing DeeProtein with our genetic algorithm GAIA, we – for the first time - established a fully closed, in silico evolution cycle driven by an intelligent network. We used AiGEM to successfully modulate the catalytic efficiency of \(\beta\)-lactamases, thereby even producing variants which highly outperform the wild type enzyme. To demonstrate AiGEM’s ability for generating functionality de novo, we created a novel, highly efficient \(\beta\)-galactosidase purely by in silico evolution of a \(\beta\) -glucuronidase parental sequence. Finally, as part of our integrated human practices project, we implemented SafetyNet, a DeeProtein-based web application safeguarding directed evolution experiments.