Proteases are naturally occurring enzymes that break down proteins into peptides and even single amino acids. They are useful in medicine and industrial processes, where they clean tissue, digest waste and help in the manufacture of everyday products. Now scientists have used artificial intelligence to design new versions from scratch.

AI tools have already successfully generated new protein shapes and structures, but using AI to create functional proteases is a significant leap forward. That’s because the resulting enzyme has to both recognize a chosen protein sequence and cut it efficiently.

To see if it could be done, David Baker at the University of Washington and his colleagues combined several advanced artificial intelligence tools to create both cysteine and zinc proteases.