Don’t worry it’s not the kind of killing you’re imagining. A team of experts looked for peptides, which are fragments of proteins that can contain the right combination to be lethal to pathogens, that were naturally produced by people, and can fight microbes. To determine the peptides that fit these conditions, they used an AI that scrutinized the chemical makeup of each and every one in the human proteome (the set of proteins the body can produce). Their search yielded 2,603 antibiotic candidates, a feat they accomplished because of AI’s strength in digesting huge data sets. Learn more about the study here.
Image credit: Solen Feyissa