Working on its own, the robot-scientist already managed to find new functions for several genes of Saccharomyces cerevisiae, also known as brewer's yeast. The lead-researcher of the project is Ross King, a computational biologist at Aberystwyth. He says that up till now Adam made modest findings, but all the discoveries were real. Their latest invention consists of a room equipped with different laboratory instruments. It includes 4 personal computers that work as one brain. In addition, Adam has robot arms, a number of cameras, liquid handlers, incubators and more.
The robot was also supported with a database that enclosed information on the yeast genes, enzymes and metabolism, as well as a delivery of hundreds of metabolites. In case the strain was spotted to grow not very well, Adam registered new information about the function of the deleted gene.
It is worth mentioning that Adam is able to perform over 1,000 related experiments daily. So far, the robot came up with and tested 20 hypotheses about the coding of genes for 13 enzymes, from which 12 were confirmed by researchers, who carried out their own experiments.
According to Will Bridewell, an artificial intelligence researcher at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, this discovery is yet another step on the way of latest technological inventions.
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