Google DeepMind Releases Atlas Revolutionizing Genetics Research
Google DeepMind has released a new database called AlphaGenome Atlas, which charts predictions of the possible effects of nine billion single variants in the human genome.
The atlas is based on the AlphaGenome model, an artificial intelligence tool that analyzes stretches of noncoding DNA and predicts how much those variants affect molecular function.
Rather than requiring researchers to analyze each variant individually, the new atlas provides precomputed predictions for every single variant in the database, allowing scientists to quickly search for any variant's effects down to the level of specific tissues.
The AlphaGenome Atlas contains a whopping petabyte of data, making it 30 times larger than its predecessor, AlphaFold. It assigns each variant an AlphaGenome Variant Impact (AVI) score, which combines predictions from both AlphaGenome and AlphaMissense to rank the impact of each variant on molecular function.
The atlas is expected to revolutionize genetics research by streamlining workflows and allowing researchers to quickly pinpoint potential causes of diseases. According to Jonathan Sebat, a psychiatric geneticist at the University of California, San Diego, 'Our own workflows in the lab can be streamlined quite a bit because we don’t actually have to compute anything.'