HN

Comments (67)

• DoctorOetker
  Not a word about promoter sequences.Imagine cellular activity as an industry zone, its not just what you can or can not make, its also 'for what concentrations of chemical species, what transcription rates should be used' so apart from the discrete Mendelian aspects (like what eye color or what have you) there is also a concensus sequence and deviations from consensus. They mention the dataset captures non-coding DNA, which should imply promoter sequences. Will it be possible to query the atlas for joint probabilities of promoter and putative target protein occurence in human genomes?Personalized medicine could never credibly take off as long as promoter sequences were excised before sequencing!
• Menu

  jFmDRz73
  This Google blog post is a distilled version of a Deep Mind blog post:https://deepmind.google/blog/alphagenome-atlas-a-predictive-...They are only announcing a cache. The origin for the cache is not discussed.In particular, the question of whether to trust the predictions is not addressed. For that, I think the citation is from January:https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10014-0
• Menu

  nimonian
  I am freaking out. This is a huge moment.I don't want to drag the discourse away from this achievement, but I hate how this is announced with blatant corporate advertising (our internal model, here are the benchmarks, gpt astra TM yours now for the low low price of £200pcm). I just didn't think Navier-Stokes falling would be sponsored by McDonald's.Still. I am crying right now. Navier-Stokes is solved.
• leopoldj
  Videos. [2] is for the scientists to start using AlphaGenome Atlas from AntiGravity.1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0aToL5C-bQ2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2qw3rDNX0Q
• Menu

  mchusma
  This has Demis written all over it. There is a great video of him with AlphaFold chatting with the team about releasing some results, and he asked something like “what if we just do them all?”Very excited to see that happen here.
• Menu

  RobotToaster
  Can this be used with a 23andMe genome to find pathogenic mutations?
• Menu

  asxndu
  I really love Deep Mind, its genuinely focused on using AI to make the world a better place.
• realcul
  So I will know which DNAs to change to become a wolverine! yay!
• anon
  undefined
• anon
  undefined
• bonsai_spool
  This may not be anything new but it makes using several Google/DeepMind resources a lot less painful.I'm comfortable programming but others who also do mol bio may be less so or may not recognize when Claude is going off the rails.
• gavinray
  Anyone know if you can use an indel VCF file with this?
• shevy-java
  All controlled by an adCompany.That is outright scary. Science is being slurped up here.
• Menu

  searine
  I saw a really interesting talk by Katie Pollard at ISMB this year about the limitations of variant prediction.The gist was, can existing variation provide enough context to infer impact of variation? The answer seemed to be no.Kind of like how frontier LLMs need to ingest larger and large amounts of text to advance. We are going to need to leverage comparative data from other species, and likely tremendous amounts of laboratory mutagenesis experiments to actually make headway on variant prediction. Nature, as it stands, just doesn't have enough human variation.
• wseqyrku
  I'm convinced AI labs are absolutely hallucinating with their random names. It doesn't even mean anything anymore. Can we go back to numbers?
• anon
  undefined
• dotinvictim
  unleash gemini 4 stop saving dario
• Menu

  mertcikla
  not my field so I can't judge how useful it is but assuming this data can be used for drug discovery and their ToS limiting to non-commercial use only. Does DeepMind plan on selling this data to pharmaceutical companies?
• MahiroHirakawa
  Cool. But is this actually advanced biology, or just making predictions about biology more accurate? Those aren't the same thing.
• Menu

  orliesaurus
  the Google DeepMind PR team can't catch a break, shame it makes no sense to me - if someone's in the field maybe they could explain to the rest of us if this is a big deal, just a PR move, or nah?
• WarmWash
  Google doing work to uncover the pandoras box of genetics? How long before they shove this under the rug...
• parasxos
  An atlas of the human genome from the company whose other atlas still routes me into a lake.