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AlphaGenome maps 9B DNA variants

73 points by ltononro ago | 7 comments

tusimi |next |previous [-]

google PR machine on relatively low-impact science goin pretty hard

ltononro |root |parent [-]

Do you really think that tho? I mean, it is the only one doing something other than all-in LLM BenchMaxxing lmao :D

moregrist |root |parent |next [-]

There are a lot of companies and academic institutions working on genomics. Most don’t do self promotion at the scale that Google does. And most aren’t on the HN radar.

mbreese |root |parent |next |previous [-]

This current project is effectively a cache database for an earlier tool. The earlier project is where the main impact is - predicting the functional effect of a variant in the human genome.

For this updated project, they effectively ran the earlier tool for all possible variants in the genome (3 billion bases in the genome * 3 single nucleotide variants = 9 billion). It’s a very useful project for people like me, but the major advance was already done (admittedly by the DeepMind team).

samuell |previous [-]

Now do the combinations of them.

ltononro |root |parent [-]

boom