BEIJING, April. 3 (Xinhuanet) -- Scientists have come up with a "robot scientist" that can independently discover new scientific findings without human assistance.

    Named Adam, the robot is the handiwork of researchers--who unveiled their work Thursday-- at Aberystwyth University and the University of Cambridge in the UK. All by itself Adam discovered new functions for a number of genes in Saccharomyces cerevisiae, aka brewer's yeast.

    Ross King, a computational biologist at Aberystwyth, who leads the project, said that Adam's results were modest, but real. "It's certainly a contribution to knowledge. It would be publishable," he says.

    "Our goal is to make science more efficient," said Ross King, a professor of biology and computer science at the University of Wales and author of a new paper in this week's issue of Science detailing Adam's work.

    "If we had computers designing and carrying out experiments we could get through many more experiments than we currently  can," said King, adding "robots don't need to take holidays."

    The ten-year-old Adam, which actually consists of a small roomful of lab equipment, has four personal computers that act as a brain, and possesses robot arms, cameras, liquid handlers, incubators and other equipment. The team gave the robot a freezer containing a library of thousands of mutant strains of yeast with individual genes deleted. It was also equipped with a database containing information about yeast genes, enzymes, and metabolism, and a supply of hundreds of metabolites.

    To discover which genes coded for which enzymes, Adam cultured a mutant yeast with a certain gene knocked out, and monitored how well the mutant grew without a particular metabolite. If the strain grew poorly without the metabolite, Adam learned something about the function of the knocked out gene. The robot could carry out more than 1000 of these experiments a day.

    In all, Adam formulated and tested 20 hypotheses about genes coding for 13 enzymes. Twelve hypotheses were confirmed. For instance, Adam correctly hypothesised that three genes it identified encode an enzyme important in producing the amino acid lysine. The researchers confirmed Adam's work with their own experiments.

   (Agencies)