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AlphaGenome Atlas: a high-resolution map of human DNA
https://deepmind.google/blog/alphagenome-atlas-a-predictive-map-of-every-possible-dna-letter-change-in-the-human-genome/ https://deepmind.google/blog/alphagenome-atlas-a-predictive-...
https://deepmind.google.com/science/alphagenome/atlas https://deepmind.google.com/science/alphagenome/atlas
- mertcikla 27d agonot 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?
- falcor84 27d agoMy understanding is that they already are, via Isomorphic Labs
- PunchTornado 27d agoHopefully. Tired, as a shareholder, to see the giveaways that deepmind is doing.
- boston_clone 27d agoAstroturfing, eh? This is verbatim the same comment as another user in this thread. Strange...
- incognito124 27d agoPunchTornado was first, fr2029 was second
- fr2029 27d agoi made no such comment. reported for harassment.
- idiotsecant 27d agoso you just happen to be posting in a thread where some random user said you made a comment but you made no comments whatsoever
- Larrikin 27d agoYou deleted the verbatim comment after it was pointed out. One was in thread and one was a stand alone comment. I was curious which was the throwaway so clicked into both profiles
- fr2029 27d ago[dead]
- jakkos 27d agoYeah, screw enabling life changing medical research, won't someone please think of the investors' financial returns??
- PunchTornado 27d agoYou can do both. Release it, but ask for money.
- dekhn 27d agoIndividual SNP predictions are not useful for drug discovery. Pharma might license this, but mainly out of fear of missing out.
- abirch 27d agoProbably. I know Google has partnerships with Pharma: https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-google-cloud-partner-to-accelerate-agentic-ai-enterprise-transformation/ https://www.merck.com/news/merck-and-google-cloud-partner-to...
- throwaway27727 26d agoThis is just typical enterprise "use AI" infrastructure, not hyper specialized drug research.
- bpodgursky 27d agoIt's a bigger deal for diagnostics than for drug development.
- parasxos 27d agoAn atlas of the human genome from the company whose other atlas still routes me into a lake.
- deleted 27d ago[deleted]
- asxndu 27d agoI really love Deep Mind, its genuinely focused on using AI to make the world a better place.
- sssilver 27d agoBe careful when loving shareholder-driven endeavors; they're a single executive decision away from breaking your heart.
- mdp2021 27d agoIt's "shareholder-linked" (probably not "driven"), but yes, upvoted. Nonetheless, even when with grave faults in the path, Google has managed to give us marvellous, paramount free resources (Google Street, Google Museum...), and would have given more (Google Books - if the negotiation had succeeded). I am grateful.
- boelboel 27d agoGoogle Streetview/maps isn't even the best mapping/'streetview' tool at this point. Filled with ads and bugs, some major bugs have been there for 10+ years.
- minimeow 27d agoNow I'm curious. What is the better mapping and streetview tool at this point?
- lorepieri 27d agoOrganic Maps for maps
- boelboel 27d agoFor maps there's quite a few, just anything that doesn't have the amount of ads beats it. For Streetview apple lookaround is a better experience if it's mapped well in your area. I believe Google has been trying to improve their Streetview in coverage as apple has become a concurrent, but it still has the same bugs people have been complaining about for years (like going backward when pressing forward type of bad). If I remember correctly the bugs have been 'closed' or something before just to include it in the same slightly different way.
- WarmWash 27d agoGoogle doing work to uncover the pandoras box of genetics? How long before they shove this under the rug...
- leopoldj 27d agoVideos. [2] is for the scientists to start using AlphaGenome Atlas from AntiGravity. 1. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0aToL5C-bQ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=U0aToL5C-bQ 2. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2qw3rDNX0Q https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=b2qw3rDNX0Q
- jFmDRz73 27d agoThis Google blog post is a distilled version of a Deep Mind blog post: https://deepmind.google/blog/alphagenome-atlas-a-predictive-map-of-every-possible-dna-letter-change-in-the-human-genome/ 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 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41586-025-10014-0
- orliesaurus 27d agothe 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?
- dgellow 27d agoJust wait a few months, if it is a big deal that will likely be obvious by then
- orliesaurus 27d agoi like this way of thinking ;)
- dgellow 27d agoDoes lots of good to my anxiety level :)
- dyauspitr 27d agoWhat are you even talking about? What do you mean catch a break? They’ve made massive contributions over the last decade.
- DroneBetter 27d agoI think orliesaurus meant the PR team is unable to rest because the rest of Deepmind is so prolific and keep coming out with new things for them to announce
- dyauspitr 27d agoI don’t think so. The tone of the comment seems derogatory.
- orliesaurus 27d ago
- deleted 27d ago[deleted]
- MahiroHirakawa 27d agoCool. But is this actually advanced biology, or just making predictions about biology more accurate? Those aren't the same thing.
- deleted 27d ago[deleted]
- dotinvictim 27d agounleash gemini 4 stop saving dario
- bonsai_spool 27d agoThis 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 27d agoAnyone know if you can use an indel VCF file with this?
- RobotToaster 27d agoCan this be used with a 23andMe genome to find pathogenic mutations?
- dekhn 27d agoNot really, no.
- shevy-java 27d agoWhy not? There is no logical reason as to why this would not work, IF it works in the first place, which I don't know. In theory the problem space here is finite, so there is of course a way to predict everything. Whether this is the case right now - who knows; I probably don't think it is currently ready. But eventually it will be. And it should not be in the hands of private companies.
- dekhn 27d agoSo it sounds like you're coming to this with very little knowledge about biology. I encourage reading up on modern challenges in pathogenic prediction, especially with regards to SNPs: on their own, with the exception of a few diseases, individual SNP predictions are meaningless in terms of actual pathogenicity.
- chorizo 27d agoBecause 23andme does not sequence your genome, only substring matches linked to specific gene variants.
- MisterMunchkin 27d ago23andMe and similar companies don't transcribe your entire genome because that would cost way more than they charge you. They just sample a few tiny sections of it.
- willturman 27d agoA few as in tens of thousands. 23andMe used a custom Illumina Infinium microarray designed around segments of particular interest. https://www.illumina.com/products/by-brand/infinium.html https://www.illumina.com/products/by-brand/infinium.html
- searine 27d agoI 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.
- robwwilliams 27d agoYes, and genetic variant generally do not act in isolation. We currently focus on the small additive effects of variants because we can with small sample sizes—and 1 million humans is marginal using a GWAS cohort to dive into epistasis. But these interaction effects among variants are critical. Now almost completely deprecated.
- dekhn 27d agoThat's an interesting statement: "The gist was, can existing variation provide enough context to infer impact of variation? The answer seemed to be no." Is this saying that if we were to sequence every human being on the planet, we'd still be unable to explain some phenotype differences caused by variation simply becase there aren't enough humans/enough variation? Interesting, as that's the first time I've heard that claim, and it would suggest that we spend our time working on mechanistic models of variant to phenotype.
- realcul 27d agoSo I will know which DNAs to change to become a wolverine! yay!
- mchusma 27d agoThis 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.
- shevy-java 27d agoWhy are you excited about this?
- dekhn 27d agoThis has nothing to do with AlphaFold at all- not sure if you were implying that. (the scientific contriution is welcome, but it's not particularly significant)
- John7878781 27d agoI don’t think Demis played a big role in this. It was mainly Ziga Avsec who developed Enformer (the first actually decent sequence-to-function model), and then AlphaGenome.
- wseqyrku 27d agoI'm convinced AI labs are absolutely hallucinating with their random names. It doesn't even mean anything anymore. Can we go back to numbers?
- shevy-java 27d agoAll controlled by an adCompany. That is outright scary. Science is being slurped up here.
- DoctorOetker 27d agoNot 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!
- dekhn 27d agoEye color is not discrete Mendelian. That's only correct to the first order. Also Mendelian has little to do with promotor sequences or differential transcription in deviations.
- nimonian 27d agoI 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.
- polishdude20 27d agoWait, is NS solved? I thought I was just a singularity thing?
- dgellow 27d agoThere is an announcement by OpenAI https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49613262
- jjallen 27d agoThis post is not about Navier-Stokes. That is in a different thread. Glad you're cry-happy though.
- adrian_b 27d agoIn another HN thread about this AlphaGenome Atlas, someone has posted a link to: https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mutate-em-all-and-see-if-you-can-sort-em-out https://www.science.org/content/blog-post/mutate-em-all-and-... which comments the results of this study: https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.25.740675v1 https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.64898/2026.07.25.740675v1 That study has done in reality what the AlphaGenome Atlas does in fiction, but instead for a human they have done it for one of the simplest viruses. So they have fuzzed the virus by mutating one by one each position of its DNA. And various dedicated AI models all made poor predictions of the results of that experiment, which casts doubts about the value of the AlphaGenome predictive map. A virus is much simpler than a human, but even for that simple virus the effects of most of the mutations could not be predicted. A half of the mutations had harmful effects, and for a half of those it is unknown for now why they were harmful. For a human the uncertainty about the effects of a mutation will be far greater than for one of the simplest viruses.
- John7878781 27d agoYep. Sequence-to-function models are still very limited. AlphaGenome Atlas, despite the flashy branding, is unlikely to provide significant benefit to researchers.
- tsoukase 26d agoMay be that's the reason for the alpha naming. We are waiting for a stable release (just kidding).
- idiotsecant 26d agoAnd it makes a lot of sense why they are limited. DNA is not an instruction set. It's more like a heavily encrypted dataset where the encryption key is the totality of physics and biology. The interactions with the physical world that result in the end product of life are enormously (it would seem hopelessly) complex. For a machine intelligence to turn DNA sequences into organisim phenotype prediction requires modelling all that in latent space. I imagine that is going to take a monumental amount of example data
- dakolli 27d agohmm gate keeping the database to elitist institutions and private businesses, I'm excited for the future!
- mentalgear 27d agoThere are AI labs headed by marketing CEOs that fake metrics, have an utter disregard for humanity and make up "AGI is imminent" propaganda for their IPO, and then there are AI labs headed by actual scientists that do actual science for humanity without constantly trying to put themselves into the spotlight.
- azan_ 27d agoInterestingly the labs led by marketing CEOs have much better models (astra is A LOT better than gemini).
- John7878781 27d agoPeople are upvoting this because it has the “Alpha______” prefix. Meanwhile, everyone in the field of genomics knows that AlphaGenome provides essentially zero improvements over the previous SOTA, Borzoi…
- atorodius 27d ago> a database that predicts the effects of every possible single nucleotide variant in the human genome. We used the AlphaGenome AI model to pre-calculate the regulatory impact of all 9 billion single-letter genetic changes, resulting in a massive, 1-petabyte dataset. This is for a database, no? While Borzoi is a model? > Here, we introduce Borzoi, a model that learns to predict cell-type-specific and tissue-specific RNA-seq coverage from DNA sequence. https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-024-02053-6 https://www.nature.com/articles/s41588-024-02053-6
- monocasa 27d agoAny model can be expressed as a database.
- baq 27d agoKolmogorov looks at this with a ‘duh’ face
- epistasis 25d agoThis type of model, of which there are many, either directly releases their results as a precomputed database right away, or others release that database, or the method gets ignored. Check out VIPdb for the broad category of methods/databases https://genomeinterpretation.org/vipdb.html https://genomeinterpretation.org/vipdb.html These are predictors for "pathogenicity". Which is the vague concept of "does it cause genetic disease in humans" where "disease" itself is defined as the broad set of things that "brings patients into the doctor to figure out what's wrong." The "regulatory impact" part of this is what differs from other predictors, in that it predicts the internal states as measured by several different assays, such as transcription regulating proteins are bound where in the genome, etc. Those predictions may or may not be usefel to people trying to reason about things going on in the cell, but my guess is that it's not going to get much use my molecular biologists, because the way the paper was described is pretty bad, and there are no experimental results I saw towards validating that. But then, I'm not super interested in this paper. It's my field, but if there's something interesting I'm sure I'll hear about it from colleagues. Google is a fantastic advertising company that sometimes also does a bit of science, but this PR push is just an advertisement. A standard work-a-day paper gets covered as if it were ground breaking, and it will get enough eyes that I feel like I can safely ignore it until somebody in the field points out something interesting.
- jheriko 27d ago[dead]
- formvoltron 27d agocould this be used with a nebula genomic sequence to find pathogenic sequences?
- SubiculumCode 27d agoAlpha Fold has continued to impact the field of protein networks, but I do hear that not every one of the deep learning biology models from Google/Deep Mind and others have made equivalent impact or had as lasting relevance in their respective domains..some have performed more poorly than other available models. I'd love to learn more about this, but this has mostly come from little snips of conversations here and there, in person and online, but I haven't seen anything comprehensive in terms of evaluating their impacts overall
- Stevvo 27d agoDon't be put off by the box asking for your "affiliation". I wrote "None", clicked submit and it took me straight to the Atlas.
- r0ze-at-hn 26d agoThe agreement does pretty much state you can't use this for anything useful. As someone who regularly investigates whole genomes I would love to use this as a tool on novel mutations. These folks are the edge cases no one else could figure out that I get a crack at. Beyond the DNA we have the symptoms and lab work and I can usually narrow it down to a handful of guesses, but it sure would be nice to use this to help rank where to invest efforts. For now i'll treat it as just another fun Google project that might come out of beta one day (or not).
- bonsai_spool 26d ago> Beyond the DNA we have the symptoms and lab work and I can usually narrow it down to a handful of guesses, but it sure would be nice to use this to help rank where to invest efforts. This is exactly what the various DeepMind products have been for, and this simply aggregates them. Why are you unable to use this for candidate discovery when that's exactly what it's for? Is this because you do gene discovery in a commercial setting?
- r0ze-at-hn 26d agoBecause the agreement explicitly lists out what it can't be used for and this is included in that list.
- bonsai_spool 26d agoWhat does the agreement say? Again, this is exactly what these products are designed for and what they’re used to do in publications
- 25d ago
- zmmmmm 27d agoIs this just Google precomputing Alpha genome values - which were already accessible via API and making them available as another API (presumably more broadly)? Or is there actually new information?
- mbreese 27d agoThat’s my reading. (That this is a cached database of Alpha values)