Orchestrated Platform for Autonomous Laboratories

Transforming Protein Engineering Through Intelligent Automation 

Scientists are advancing a new paradigm for protein engineering by tightly integrating AI-driven protein design with dexterous, humanoid robotics. Building on Argonne’s success in autonomous discovery, the OPAL effort will create an end-to-end, automated ​“design-build-test-learn” (DBTL) platform in which autonomous agents generate protein designs, convert them into executable lab plans, run complex experiments and interpret results in real time — dramatically increasing speed and reproducibility. By eliminating the bottleneck between computational design and experimental validation, Argonne aims to make protein optimization scalable and routine across distributed laboratory infrastructure.   

Argonne is developing a distributed agentic research framework that coordinates specialized design, planning, execution, analysis and coordination agents across both digital and physical resources. Scientists are training and scaling foundation models that connect protein and genome information to protein structure. Additionally, they are prototyping agentic workflows for protein design and optimization and pairing them with robotic execution. The robotic fleet will carry out tasks such as molecular cloning, protein expression, purification, and functional assays with human-level dexterity and beyond-human precision, allowing the platform to perform parallel experimental campaigns.

A Multi-Lab Collaboration

OPAL is a national collaboration supported by the U.S. Department of Energy Office of Biological & Environmental Research and Office of Advanced Scientific Computing Research. The project is creating a network of autonomous laboratories that can learn, adapt, and accelerate breakthroughs across biology, biotechnology, and energy science.

Argonne, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Oak Ridge National Laboratory, and Pacific Northwest National Laboratory have joined forces to make autonomous science a reality, building a federated network of intelligent, interconnected research platforms that can collaborate and share data in real time, reducing the time from discovery to real-world application. From designing new microbial proteins and pathways to helping plants pull critical minerals from the soil, these teams are focusing on the discoveries that will power America’s future.

Learn more at https://​opal​-doe​.org/.