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Guided by AI, Robotic Platform Automates Molecule Manufacture


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Part of a robotic system for automating production of small molecules.

An artificial intelligence-guided system developed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology uses robots to automate the fabrication of small molecules.

Credit: Connor Coley, Felice Frankel

Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) researchers have developed an artificial intelligence (AI)-guided system, which uses robots to automate small-molecule fabrication.

MIT's Klavs F. Jensen said the platform "has the promise to help people cut out all the tedious parts of molecule building," which include investigating potential reaction pathways and assembling the components of a molecular production line whenever a new molecule is manufactured.

The platform first has AI-guided software suggest a route for molecular synthesis, then expert chemists vet and hone this route into a chemical recipe.

Afterwards, the recipe is transmitted to a robotic platform that automatically constructs hardware, and executes molecular-building reactions.

The open source synthesis-suggesting software uses several network models trained on millions of published reactions to identify reaction transitions and conditions that should be appropriate for compound assembly.

From MIT News
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Abstracts Copyright © 2019 SmithBucklin, Washington, DC, USA


 

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