Lucas

Super proud of the work that’s come out of this project. And I can’t say it enough, could not have worked with a better group of people.

Imagine programming protein, DNA, and RNA systems like you would write computer code, or even by natural language prompting of an AI agent. @brianhie and team just made this a reality with Proto: a high-level programming language for generative biology.

@aditimerch @BrianHie @dan_guo_ @bviggiano_13 @ev_hur @tinabmai @peteryin21 @samuelhking No other group of people I would’ve rather cooped up in Proto HQ with!

None of this would have been possible without the support of @BrianHie, my brilliant co-first authors @dan_guo_ and @bviggiano_13, and the rest of the Proto team, @leba1127, @ev_hur, @tinabmai, @peteryin21, and @samuelhking! Incredibly grateful to have spent the last few months working alongside these incredible people in our small corner of Arc!

Biological engineering has long aimed to design living systems with the programmability of software, but the tools to do so rarely fit together. Today, we’re sharing our preprint introducing Proto, a high-level programming language for generative biology that composes models and design tools across DNA, RNA, and proteins to optimize towards user-specified functional objectives.

In new work, we lay out a vision for a high-level programming language for generative biology, called Proto. Proto composes generative and predictive models spanning DNA, RNA, proteins, ligands, and their interactions, which we use to design complex biological functions. 1/n

Performing bioinformatics analysis and building biological design pipelines can mean a lot of infrastructure fighting: fragmented tools, idiosyncratic formats, and APIs that are hard to compose. That friction slows researchers down, and as this Anthropic blog post lays out, it's now a major bottleneck for modern agents as well. Today, we're releasing Proto, a design platform for generative biology. This thread is on the layer that makes it work: proto-tools, a universal open-source infrastructure layer for biological models and tools.

Biological engineering has long aimed to make biological systems designable, composable, and programmable across scales and modalities. However, existing biological AI models and tools are siloed and difficult to compose. Today, we’re proud to share our preprint for Proto, a high-level programming language and open infrastructure layer generative biology. *This thread is centered around the Proto Language. For the full paper thread, check out: x.com/aditimerch/sta…