Teaching machines to design molecular switches

In biology, many RNA molecules act as sophisticated microscopic machines. Among them, riboswitches function as tiny biological sensors, changing their 3D shape upon binding to a specific metabolite. This shape-change acts as a switch, often turning a downstream gene "on" or "off." The ability to design artificial switches from scratch would hold immense promise for synthetic biology, drug design, and new diagnostic tools. However, designing a sequence that can stably fold into two different shapes and switch between them is an extremely difficult challenge.