A self-driving lab named AutoDNA can work out the constituent ‘letters’ in a snippet of DNA. Credit: Turtle Rock Scientific/Science Source/Science Photo Library

To say that someone has ‘good hands’ is high praise in a molecular biology laboratory, where researchers must deftly handle delicate glassware, pipette samples and more. But in an unusual genetics lab at Shanghai Jiao Tong University in China, a team of robots driven by artificial intelligence is designing and doing experiments with no hands to speak of.

Inside the ‘self-driving’ lab revolutio

The facility, described today 1 in Nature , is one of the latest steps towards ‘self-driving’ labs that are guided by AI , with minimal input from human scientists.…