Edd Gent in Singularity Hub:
Vast swathes of the human genome remain a mystery to science. A new AI from Google DeepMind is helping researchers understand how these stretches of DNA impact the activity of other genes. While the Human Genome Project produced a complete map of our DNA, we still know surprisingly little about what most of it does. Roughly 2 percent of the human genome encodes specific proteins, but the purpose of the other 98 percent is much less clear.
Historically, scientists called this part of the genome “junk DNA.” But there’s growing recognition these so-called “non-coding” regions play a critical role in regulating the expression of genes elsewhere in the genome. Teasing out these interactions is a complicated business. But now a new Google DeepMind model called AlphaGenome can take long stretches of DNA and make predictions about how different genetic variants will affect gene expression, as well as a host of other important properties. “We have, for the first time, created a single model that unifies many different challenges that come with understanding the genome,” Pushmeet Kohli, a vice president for research at DeepMind, told MIT Technology Review.
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