Google’s new genome analyzer. Short video.
The product.
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When scientists first sequenced the human genome in 2003, they revealed the full set of DNA instructions that make a person. But we still didn’t know what all those 3 billion genetic letters actually do.
Now Google’s DeepMind division says it’s made a leap in trying to understand the code with AlphaGenome, an AI model that predicts what effects small changes in DNA will have on an array of molecular processes, such as whether a gene’s activity will go up or down. It’s just the sort of question biologists regularly assess in lab experiments.
“We have, for the first time, created a single model that unifies many different challenges that come with understanding the genome,” says Pushmeet Kohli, a vice president for research at DeepMind.
Five years ago, the Google AI division released AlphaFold, a technology for predicting the 3D shape of proteins. That work was honored with a Nobel Prize last year and spawned a drug-discovery spinout, Isomorphic Labs, and a boom of companies that hope AI will be able to propose new drugs.
AlphaGenome is an attempt to further smooth biologists’ work by answering basic questions about how changing DNA letters alters gene activity and, eventually, how genetic mutations affect our health.
“We have these 3 billion letters of DNA that make up a human genome, but every person is slightly different, and we don’t fully understand what those differences do,” says Caleb Lareau, a computational biologist at Memorial Sloan Kettering Cancer Center who has had early access to AlphaGenome. “This is the most powerful tool to date to model that.”
Google says AlphaGenome will be free for noncommercial users and plans to release full details of the model in the future. According to Kohli, the company is exploring ways to “enable use of this model by commercial entities” such as biotech companies.
Don’t expect AlphaGenome to predict very much about individual people, however. It offers clues to nitty-gritty molecular details of gene activity, not 23andMe-type revelations of a person’s traits or ancestry.
“We haven’t designed or validated AlphaGenome for personal genome prediction, a known challenge for AI models,” Google said in a statement.
Nature: DeepMind’s new AlphaGenome AI tackles the ‘dark matter’ in our DNA
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