Google DeepMind Says Its AI Is Being Used on Disease-Resistant Crops and to Map Hardier Sorghum
At a Singapore summit, DeepMind director Ramine Tinati described AI work on crop immunity, an open sorghum atlas and farm advice being scaled to 11 countries.
The AI models built to read biology are being applied to crop research. At an agri-food summit in Singapore, Google DeepMind director Ramine Tinati laid out how the lab’s tools are being used on crops, seeds and small farms.
TLDR
- Researchers at the UK’s Sainsbury Laboratory are using AlphaFold in work that could help develop plants with stronger immunity.
- AlphaGenome technologies are helping map sorghum varieties that may be more resilient, in an open atlas for researchers.
- A program with smallholder farmers in India is being scaled to 11 countries.
- These are DeepMind’s own descriptions of its work, reported by FoodNavigator.
Stronger Crop Immunity
AlphaFold predicts protein structures computationally, and its database holds predictions for hundreds of millions of proteins. At the Sainsbury Laboratory, researchers are using it to work on crop immune systems. “We’re using it to create more disease-resistant crops,” Tinati said, FoodNavigator reported.
An Open Sorghum Atlas
Some AlphaGenome technologies are being used to map sorghum varieties that may be more resilient to external conditions. “It’s an open atlas available for researchers to consume and hopefully optimise the plants or seeds that they are growing,” Tinati said.
Advice for Small Farms
DeepMind is also working with smallholder farmers and soil scientists in India, combining farm-level data with soil, weather and climate information to guide seed choice, harvest timing and when to rest a plot. The work is being scaled to 11 countries.
Faster Lab Work
The company’s AI co-scientist tool helps researchers develop experimental approaches by exploring thousands of permutations. The longer-term goal is a “virtual cell” that would allow more experimentation on a computer before work begins in a wet lab. “It’s about augmentation. It’s not about replacing the scientist,” Tinati said.
Why It Matters
Tinati said crops “need to be more resilient in the future” as weather grows more extreme. These are DeepMind’s own descriptions, and the report gives no yield or adoption figures, so it does not show field results. DeepMind says the sorghum atlas is open to outside researchers.
Source: FoodNavigator.