AlphaGenome Atlas: a high-resolution map of human DNA

131–132 of 132 posts

Re: AlphaGenome Atlas: a high-resolution map of human DNA

#131

Post by idiotsecant » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 11:10 AM UTC

John7878781 wrote: post #91

adrian_b wrote: post #77

In another HN thread about this AlphaGenome Atlas, someone has posted a link to: 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 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 th…

Yep. Sequence-to-function models are still very limited. AlphaGenome Atlas, despite the flashy branding, is unlikely to provide significant benefit to researchers.

And 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

Re: AlphaGenome Atlas: a high-resolution map of human DNA

#132

Post by bonsai_spool » Wed, Sep 09, 2026, 12:25 PM UTC

r0ze-at-hn wrote: post #129

Stevvo wrote: post #106

Don't be put off by the box asking for your "affiliation". I wrote "None", clicked submit and it took me straight to the Atlas.

The 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…

> 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?

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