In a short space of time, artificial intelligence has become a whiz at designing proteins, molecular machines that perform various functions such as speeding up reactions, producing fluorescent signals and breaking down plastic. But getting AI to design the specific protein you want usually requires the user to have a strong understanding of molecular structures and geometric constraints to guide the models correctly.

Well, that requirement may soon be a thing of the past.

Scientists led by a team at Westlake University in China have developed a large-scale AI model called Pinal that can generate candidate proteins from natural language prompts alone. They detail their research and how their AI model works in a paper published in the journal Nature.