Protein engineering is a time-consuming and laborious process. This paper introduces the Self-driving Autonomous Machines for Protein Landscape Exploration (SAMPLE) platform for fully autonomous protein engineering. SAMPLE uses an intelligent agent to learn protein sequence-function relationships, design new proteins, and experimentally test them using a robotic system. Four SAMPLE agents successfully engineered glycoside hydrolase enzymes with enhanced thermal tolerance, demonstrating the platform's potential to accelerate scientific discovery in protein engineering and synthetic biology.

Jacob T. Rapp, Bennett J. Bremer, Philip A. Romero