alt Hacker NewsIn 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 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.
Replies
Yep. Sequence-to-function models are still very limited. AlphaGenome Atlas, despite the flashy branding, is unlikely to provide significant benefit to researchers.
> 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
I would not group AlphaGenome into the pile of failed predictions of other models. AlphaGenome deserves to get evaluated based off its own merits.