Robots and artificial intelligence (AI) will supporting researchers in the development of the US bioeconomy with the Department of Energy (DoE) commissioning a new platform allowing scientists to explore bacteria and fungi that could play a role in producing chemicals, biomaterials, energy, fuel and even extracting critical minerals from the ground.
The Anaerobic Microbial Phenotyping Platform (AMP2), which was built by Gingko Bioworks, is said to be the world’s largest autonomous-capable science system for anaerobic microbial experimentation. The DoE said: “This first-of-its-kind capability will transform how the US identifies, grows, and optimises the use of microbes in days and weeks, instead of years, using automation and AI.”
This platform is located at Pacific Northwest National Laboratory, (PNNL) Washington, US, in the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory and will become operational in January 2026. It will be available to scientists from across the US working with the DoE looking at the characteristics of anaerobic microbes.
PNNL points out that while bacteria and fungi are widely used in industry, much of this development has been a result of trial and error. There are also large gaps in knowledge as to how microbes behave under different growth conditions and environments, and how these might be manipulated to produce materials useful to society.
The DoE said that the AMP2 platform will serve as a prototype for its planned development of the larger Microbial Molecular Phenotyping Capability (M2PC). Together the two systems will establish the world’s largest autonomous microbial infrastructure, and position the US to lead in biotechnology, biomanufacturing and innovation in next generation materials. Groundbreaking for the M2PC facility is slated for next year, and it is expected to be ready for use by 2030. Funding for both AMP2 and M2PC came from the DoE Office of Science.
Explaining how the platforms work PNNL said that one portion of the autonomous science will involve robots doing tasks such as filling, loading and moving sample containers around the clock. However, the system will also allow for “designing a whole series of investigations so that one experiment flows into another experiment automatically, without constant human intervention,” the PNNL said.
AI analytical tools and agents will be used to analyse findings as they happen, then immediately redirect the next experiments based on those findings far faster than a human. The systems will have the ability to move automatically to the next round of experiments or to collaborate with scientists to guide experimental designs. Automation engineers will be running and maintaining the system, PNNL said.
This setup will make it possible for researchers to do more experiments than they otherwise could, providing a huge dataset from which to draw conclusions far faster and more efficiently than it would take if done in the by traditional methods.
“Trying to disentangle the control levers so that microbes do what we want demands a level of experimental technology not currently available. In both AMP2 and M2PC, the level of modular and R&D-focused automation and integration with AI will allow the DoE and the scientific community to perform experiments to learn more in ways, and on a scale, that we simply cannot do using today’s methods,” said Douglas Mans, Interim Director of Earth and Biological Sciences at PNNL.
The global bioeconomy is valued at more than $4 trillion and this is expected to grow to more than $30 trillion over the next three decades. The DoE said that that the development of the “nation’s most advanced autonomous facility for anaerobic microbial research is expected to play a critical role.”
Scott Baker, Microbial Molecular Phenotyping Capability Leader, who is involved in the development of both AMP2 and M2PC said: “The quest to understand the biology underlying microbial phenotypes is a big deal. Scientists so far have explored only a small fraction of the microbial species that exist on our planet. To create a very broad, basic understanding of the breadth of the microbial world and to be able to predict and control what these bugs do, we need a huge team of researchers doing impactful science, coupled with one of the most sophisticated laboratories in the world focused on the microbial world.” Baker added “With AI and autonomous science, we’re in a perfect storm of technology developments to make disruptive leaps in our ability to advance biotechnology for the bioeconomy.”
The DoE said that these new platforms support the US Government’s Genesis Mission, which was announced in November. The mission is described as: “A dedicated, coordinated national effort to unleash a new age of AI accelerated innovation and discovery that can solve the most challenging problems of this century." The idea is to build an integrated AI platform to harness federal scientific datasets - the world’s largest collection of such datasets, developed over decades - to train scientific foundation models and create AI agents to test new hypotheses, automate research workflows, and accelerate scientific breakthroughs.
Further reading on AI and scientific discovery:
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