“Dunsel is a term used by midshipmen at Starfleet Academy. It refers to a part which serves no useful purpose.” Mr Spock, in Star Trek, Episode 53: “The Ultimate Computer” Paranoia began morphing into depression with the arrival of the 15 January 2004 issue of Nature. On page 247 was a paper by King et al. entitled ‘Functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation by a robot scientist’. The paper describes an automated system that uses techniques from artificial intelligence to formulate hypotheses to explain observations. The system then devises experiments to. | Comment Doctor Dunsel Gregory A Petsko Address Rosenstiel Basic Medical Sciences Research Center Brandeis University Waltham MA 02454-9110 USA. E-mail petsko@ Published 29 March 2004 Genome Biology 2004 5 104 The electronic version of this article is the complete one and can be found online at http 2004 5M 104 2004 BioMed Central Ltd Dunsel. is a term used by midshipmen at Starfleet Academy. It refers to a part which serves no useful purpose. Mr Spock in Star Trek Episode 53 The Ultimate Computer Paranoia began morphing into depression with the arrival of the 15 January 2004 issue of Nature. On page 247 was a paper by King et al. entitled Functional genomic hypothesis generation and experimentation by a robot scientist . The paper describes an automated system that uses techniques from artificial intelligence to formulate hypotheses to explain observations. The system then devises experiments to test these hypotheses and actually carries out the experiments using a simple laboratory robot. But that s not all. It then interprets the results so as to falsify any hypotheses not consistent with the data. Moreover it can iterate this process making it capable of developing and testing quite extensive models. In the paper the authors used this system to probe the genetic control of aromatic amino-acid biosynthesis in yeast using various growth conditions and auxotrophic strains. The robot scientist took a series of systematic gene deletion strains and tried growing each in nutritional medium that lacked one of the intermediates in the pathway. If the deleted gene was required to make that intermediate the strain would not grow and a component of the pathway would have been identified. The machine automatically examined the cultures to see how opaque they were returned the results to the artificial intelligence package and then received instructions for what experiments to perform to validate the hypotheses based on the results of the first .
