The Virtual Lab is an AI-human collaboration for science research. In the Virtual Lab, a human researcher works with a team of large language model (LLM) agents to perform scientific research. Interaction between the human researcher and the LLM agents occurs via a series of team meetings, where all the LLM agents discuss a scientific agenda posed by the human researcher, and individual meetings, where the human researcher interacts with a single LLM agent to solve a particular scientific task.
As a real-world demonstration, we applied the Virtual Lab to design nanobodies for one of the latest variants of SARS-CoV-2 (see nanobody_design). The Virtual Lab built a computational pipeline consisting of ESM, AlphaFold-Multimer, and Rosetta and used it to design 92 nanobodies that were experimentally validated.
Please see the notebook nanobody_design/run_nanobody_design.ipynb for an example of how to use the Virtual Lab to create agents and run team and individual meetings for nanobody design.
Clone the repo, set up a conda environment, and install the required packages.
git clone https://github.com/zou-group/virtual_lab.git
cd virtual_lab
conda create -y -n virtual_lab python=3.12
conda activate virtual_lab
pip install -e .The Virtual Lab currently uses GPT-4o from OpenAI. Save your OpenAI API key as the environment variable OPENAI_API_KEY. For example, add export OPENAI_API_KEY=<your_key> to your .bashrc or .bash_profile.