Google Deepmind just broke chemistry.. They open-sourced a model that can invent completely new biology from scratch. It’s called “AlphaProtein Novo” It's an AI pipeline that designs brand new enzymes for "new-to-nature" chemical reactions that have never existed in any living organism. to put this in perspective.. standard protein ai models (like alphafold) answer the question "what shape will this protein have?". ap novo answers the question "can i make a protein that does this specific chemistry?". the results from the paper are actually terrifyingly good: the ai designed an enzyme to synthesize piperidines, which are a critical building block used in pharmaceuticals and materials. this designed enzyme inverted natural biases to achieve near-perfect regioselectivity. it produced the chemical building block 99x more often than the competing natural product. it also designed an enzyme to hydrolyze DEHP, which is a pervasive plastic environmental toxin. this plastic-eating ai enzyme was 14-fold more active at 90°C than at room temperature, and survived in 75% acetonitrile. meanwhile, natural enzymes completely failed and were entirely inactive under those exact same extreme conditions. these new ai-generated designs are up to 60% smaller than natural equivalents. because they are smaller, they have a much higher mass density of active sites. i am speechless.. this is the holy grail of synthetic biology. we don't have to wait millions of years for microbes to evolve enzymes that eat our pollution or build our drugs.. we can just compute them on a gpu today. the ai's success rate in finding functional designs actually matches or surpasses traditional natural sequence screening. and deepmind open-sourced the whole thing on github.