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Robo-scientist’s first findings

bBy Victoria Gill/bbr /Science reporter, BBC Newsbr /ppimg src="http://newsimg.bbc.co.uk/media/images/45627000/jpg/_45627103_king2hr.jpg" align="left" width="226" height="170" alt="Robot scientist" border="0" vspace="4" hspace="4"/pp class="first"b Scientists have created an ideal colleague - a robot that performs hundreds of repetitive experiments./bp The robot, called Adam, is the first machine to have independently quot;discovered new scientific knowledgequot;. /pp It has already identified the role of several genes in yeast cells, and is able to plan further experiments to test its own hypotheses. /pp The UK-based team that built Adam describes the breakthrough in the journal Science. /pp Ross King from the department of computer science at Aberystwyth University, and who led the team, told BBC News that he envisioned a future when human scientists' time would be quot;freed up to do more advanced experimentsquot;. /pp Robotic colleagues, he said, could carry out the more mundane and time-consuming tasks. /pp quot;Adam is a prototype but, in 10-20 years, I think machines like this could be commonly used in laboratories,quot; said Professor King. /pp b Robotic planning/b/pp Adam can carry out up to 1,000 experiments each day, and was designed to investigate the function of genes in yeast cells - it has worked out the role of 12 of these genes. /pp Biologists use the yeast cells to investigate biological systems because they are simple and easy to study. /pp quot;When you sequence the yeast genome - the 6,000 different genes contained in yeast - you know what all the component parts are, but you don't know what they do,quot; explained Professor King./pp /quot;iRobots express scientific findings in a much clearer form than humansquot;/ibr /bProfessor Ross Kingbr/Aberystwyth University/bbr /br /p The robot was able to work out the role of the genes by observing yeast cells as they grew. /pp It used existing information about the function of known genes to make predictions about the role an unknown gene might play in the cell's growth. /pp It then tested this by looking at a strain of yeast from which that gene had been removed. /pp quot;It's like a car,quot; Professor King said. quot;If you remove one component from the engine, then drive the car to see how it performs, you can find out what that particular component does.quot; /pp b Expensive assistant/b/pp Duc Pham from the Manufacturing Engineering Centre at Cardiff University described the robot scientist as quot;a clever application of robotics and computer softwarequot;. /pp But, he added, quot;it's more like a junior lab assistantquot; than a scientist. quot;It will be a long time before computers can replace human scientists.quot; /pp Professor King agreed that the robot was in its early stages of development./pp quot;If you spent all of the money we've spent on Adam on employing human biologists, Adam probably wouldn't turn out to be the cost-effective option,quot; he said. /pp quot;But that was the case with the first car. Initially, the investment in the technology wasn't as cost-effective as sticking with horses.quot; /pp He also pointed out that his robotic associate is able to express scientific findings in a clearer way than humans. /pp quot;It expresses its conclusions in logic,quot; he said. quot;Human language, with all its nuances, may not be the best way to communicate scientific findings.quot; /pp The same team is developing another, more advanced robot scientist called Eve, which is designed to screen new drugs. /phrpThis article is from the a href="http://news.bbc.co.uk"BBC News website/a. #169; British Broadcasting Corporation/pdiv class="feedflare" a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?a=NqOtQIHfWWU:VO6tTCdNUQg:F7zBnMyn0Lo"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?i=NqOtQIHfWWU:VO6tTCdNUQg:F7zBnMyn0Lo" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?a=NqOtQIHfWWU:VO6tTCdNUQg:V_sGLiPBpWU"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?i=NqOtQIHfWWU:VO6tTCdNUQg:V_sGLiPBpWU" border="0"/img/a a href="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?a=NqOtQIHfWWU:VO6tTCdNUQg:yIl2AUoC8zA"img src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~ff/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed?d=yIl2AUoC8zA" border="0"/img/a /divimg src="http://feeds2.feedburner.com/~r/bbcnewstechnologyfullfeed/~4/NqOtQIHfWWU" height="1" width="1"/