Google DeepMind says Antigravity identified an antimicrobial peptide candidate

Google DeepMind says it used Google Antigravity, its agentic development platform, to search for and evaluate candidates for new antimicrobial peptides. In an interactive session, researchers set the goal of finding peptides active against Streptococcus pseudopneumoniae, while the platform coordinated database searches, structural analyses and literature synthesis.

According to the company, the ProtNLM model helped examine millions of proteins with previously uncharacterized functions in the UniProt database, predicting biological functions from amino acid sequences. The identified candidate has predicted activity against pathogens involved in respiratory tract infections and is supported by structural and genomic evidence, but it still requires validation in laboratory experiments. Google DeepMind says the approach could speed up a process that is traditionally fragmented and labor-intensive.