Google DeepMind’s AlphaGenome Atlas maps all 9 billion possible human DNA changes
Google LLC’s DeepMind research unit said today it has used its AlphaGenome artificial intelligence model to predict the biological consequences of the more than 9 billion possible single-letter changes to human DNA.
It’s making the resulting database available free to researchers globally via the AlphaGenome Atlas, released today. The AlphaGenome Atlas is a precomputed catalogue of how each substitution of a single DNA base is likely to impact the machinery that switches genes on and off. It contains more than 1 petabyte of data, making it about 30-times the size of Google’s AlphaFold database.
In a blog post, DeepMind said it should help to dramatically speed up genetic research. Previously, researchers had to do this manually by running a model against each variant, one at a time, or test the variants in a laboratory. But this was an incredibly slow process, and would have taken several human lifetimes to discover the consequences of all of the 9 billion possible single-letter mutations.
With the Atlas, the work of biologists and medical researchers should be made much easier, aiding their understanding of genetic diseases and speeding up research into possible cures. Google is making it free for noncommercial researchers through a web portal, and also through the existing AlphaGenome application programming interface and as a skill in Google Antigravity. Later, DeepMind says, it will offer commercial access too, via a Google Cloud service.
