ArticleScience advances2020
A curious formulation robot enables the discovery of a novel protocell behavior.
Article in Science advances, 2020. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 19 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
19 citing papers in PubMed.
- Molecular Design with Artificial Intelligence: Progress and Perspectives for Small Molecules.Chemical reviews · 2026Review
- PhaseTransfer: A transfer learning framework for efficient phase diagram mapping.npj computational materials · 2026Article
- Role of spinal sensorimotor circuits in triphasic muscle command: a simulation approach using goal exploration process.Frontiers in computational neuroscience · 2026Article
- Discovering sensorimotor agency in cellular automata using diversity search.Science advances · 2025Article
- Steering towards safe self-driving laboratories.Nature reviews. Chemistry · 2025Review
- Advancing genetic engineering with active learning: theory, implementations and potential opportunities.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2025Review
- AI-driven automated discovery tools reveal diverse behavioral competencies of biological networks.eLife · 2025Article
- Self-Driving Laboratories for Chemistry and Materials Science.Chemical reviews · 2024Review
- Clover: An unbiased method for prioritizing differentially expressed genes using a data-driven approach.Genes to cells : devoted to molecular & cellular mechanisms · 2024Article
- Machine culture.Nature human behaviour · 2023Review
- Robotic Modules for the Programmable Chemputation of Molecules and Materials.ACS central science · 2023Review
- Review
- An artificial intelligence enabled chemical synthesis robot for exploration and optimization of nanomaterials.Science advances · 2022Article
- A self-driving laboratory advances the Pareto front for material properties.Nature communications · 2022Article
- On scientific understanding with artificial intelligence.Nature reviews. Physics · 2022Review
- Lessons for Robotics From the Control Architecture of the Octopus.Frontiers in robotics and AI · 2022Article
- Golem: an algorithm for robust experiment and process optimization.Chemical science · 2021Article
- Pushing property limits in materials discoveryChemical science · 2020Article
- Curiosity-driven search for novel nonequilibrium behaviors.Physical review researchArticle
Corrections and comments
PubMed lists nothing against this paper. Absence here is not a guarantee, only a check that was made.
Authors and funding
4 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
We describe a chemical robotic assistant equipped with a curiosity algorithm (CA) that can efficiently explore the states a complex chemical system can exhibit. The CA-robot is designed to explore formulations in an open-ended way with no explicit optimization target. By applying the CA-robot to the study of self-propelling multicomponent oil-in-water protocell droplets, we are able to observe an order of magnitude more variety in droplet behaviors than possible with a random parameter search and given the same budget. We demonstrate that the CA-robot enabled the observation of a sudden and highly specific response of droplets to slight temperature changes. Six modes of self-propelled droplet motion were identified and classified using a time-temperature phase diagram and probed using a variety of techniques including NMR. This work illustrates how CAs can make better use of a limited experimental budget and significantly increase the rate of unpredictable observations, leading to new discoveries with potential applications in formulation chemistry.
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.