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Motivation: Connecting genes to desired plant and microbial traits is complex but essential to designing biotechnologies that meet American needs for energy, critical materials, and manufacturing.
Approach: Aligned with the Genesis OPAL Project, agentic AI leverages the Frontier exascale supercomputer for real-time analyses of data from ORNL’s autonomous Advanced Plant Phenotyping Laboratory (APPL), exploring ways to enhance how roots “mine” dilute critical minerals from soils.
Impacts:
- Agentic AI monitors, interprets, and recommends on-the-fly adjustments to experiments to accelerate adaptive learning for bioengineering.
- Reduces analysis time of APPL imaging from 168 hours to <1 minute.
- Enables adaptive workflows and smart experiments for bioengineering (enhancing plant uptake of critical minerals).
S&T Challenge: Aligns with “Scaling the Biotechnology Revolution,” “Achieving AI-Driven Autonomous Laboratories,” and “Securing America’s Critical Minerals Supply”