October 9
Located in Guangming Science City
The team of Professor Shi Mang of Sun Yat-sen University School of Medicine
With Alibaba Cloud Li Zhaorong team
Published in the journal Cell
More than 160,000 species were reported in 180 supergroups
Global RNA virus discovery
This is the largest RNA virus study to date
Dramatically expands the diversity of RNA viruses around the world
The study applies artificial intelligence techniques to virus identification
Discovery of viral "dark matter" that traditional methods have failed to discover
A new path of virology research was explored
Sun Yat-sen University Shenzhen Campus is located at No. 66 Gongchang Road, Guangming District, covering an area of about 1.44 million square meters and a total construction area of about 1.27 million square meters. Sun Yat-sen University Shenzhen Campus is one of the main campuses of Sun Yat-sen University, since 2015 Shenzhen Municipal People's Government and Sun Yat-sen University began to cooperate, Sun Yat-sen University Shenzhen Campus has 17 integrated colleges, 2 affiliated hospitals, 1.29 million square meters of school buildings, nearly 15,000 teachers and students, the whole chain of discipline layout, full coverage docking Shenzhen "20+8" industrial cluster planning, the two sides support each other, become a model of city-school cooperation.
The School of Medicine of Sun Yat-sen University is the origin of Sun Yat-sen University's Shenzhen campus, and the construction of the college is the top priority of the strategic layout of the entire Shenzhen campus. After the release of the paper, a reporter from Shenzhen Satellite TV & One Shenzhen client interviewed Professor Shi Mang for the first time.
Traditional methods of virus discovery have reached a bottleneck
Artificial intelligence breaks through the "known" and explores the "unknown"
Traditional virus discovery methods, including virus isolation and bioinformatics analysis of bioomics, are highly dependent on existing knowledge, and have low recognition efficiency in the face of RNA viruses, which are highly differentiated, diverse, and easily mutated.
In this study, the LucaProt AI algorithm developed by the team is able to perform deep learning on viral and non-viral genome sequences and autonomously determine viral sequences in the dataset.
Shi Mang told reporters: "The AI-driven model we built, the LucaProt model, can not only accurately identify RNA viruses, but also find viruses that cannot be found by traditional methods, breaking through our understanding of the entire virus circle. ”
Using this algorithm, the research team found more than 510,000 viral genomes in 10,487 RNA sequencing data from samples from global biological environments, representing more than 160,000 potential virus species and 180 RNA virus supergroups. Among them, 23 supergroups cannot be identified by sequence homology and are known as the "dark matter" of the viromeric.
Use artificial intelligence to dig deep and classify the global virome
"AI is a data-driven approach. Under the framework of artificial intelligence, we first collect a large amount of high-quality data, so that the artificial intelligence can find patterns by learning this data, help us make judgments and predictions, and feedback what it has learned. Artificial intelligence is a very powerful tool that will be widely used in various fields of scientific research in the future. ”
Discovery of a large number of new RNA viruses
Refresh the global perception of the virus circle
Through further analysis, the team reported the longest RNA viral genome to date, with a length of 47,250 nucleotides, and discovered a genome structure beyond previously understood, demonstrating the flexibility of RNA virus genome evolution.
Genetic diversity of newly discovered viruses (yellow section)
At the same time, the team also identified a variety of viral functional proteins, especially those associated with bacteria, further indicating that there are more types of RNA phages to be explored.
"In the face of new viruses of distant origin, the existing virus classification system has become inadequate. In the future, there may be large-scale adjustments to this system in terms of deeper classifications such as phylum and class. "Our study demonstrates the depth of virus diversity, but the breadth still needs to be supplemented by more samples." The diversity of viruses is far greater than human imagination can see, and what we are currently seeing is still the tip of the iceberg. ”
"I am very lucky to be in Shenzhen"
Thrive in a pure and inclusive research environment
Universities are the main force of basic research and the source of major scientific and technological breakthroughs, and they are also the "rich mines" of scientific and technological achievements. Talking about the feeling of achieving this new scientific research achievement at Sun Yat-sen University School of Medicine, Shi Mang said: "I am very lucky to come to Shenzhen! ”
(Shi Mang)
He told reporters that the School of Medicine of Sun Yat-sen University has not only introduced outstanding talents from all over the world, but also provided the team with a superior research environment, sufficient space and advanced equipment, giving the team a very inclusive scientific research environment.
"More importantly, the strong support given to us by the Shenzhen government has become a solid foundation for us to focus on high-level research, so that we can devote ourselves to scientific research with peace of mind," Shi added. ”
(Sun Yat-sen University School of Medicine)
In Shenzhen, a two-way "through train" has been set up between universities and enterprises, with industry-university-research bases, joint laboratories and innovation platforms all over the district, and the transformation of scientific and technological achievements has achieved a "two-way rush".
Shi Mang said: "We should encourage universities and enterprises to cooperate more!" The strength of universities lies in academic accumulation and research atmosphere, while the strength of enterprises is efficiency and resources, and the combination of the two can produce many new ideas and results. ”
Shi Mang said that he hopes to continue to cooperate with Alibaba Cloud Feitian Lab through cross-field scientific research in the future, such as evaluating which viruses may become the X pathogen that will cause the next global pandemic.
Content source: Shenzhen Satellite TV Deep Vision News
Editor: Mak Yongyu
Reviewer: Jin Feng, Chen Yuanyuan, Lin Qiuying
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