12d (edited) • General discussion
Journal Club No. 05 drops tonight at 7pm Sydney.
This one is different from the others. We are not reading a lab discovery. We are reading a tool: AlphaGenome, the model Google DeepMind released this year that takes raw DNA sequence and predicts thousands of things about what it does, at single-letter resolution.
On paper it sounds like the genome is solved. It is not, and the reason why is the most useful part of the session.
Here is the detail worth sitting with before you watch. The model hands you a score. This variant probably changes gene expression, by this much, with this confidence. That score is real, and it is often right. But a score is not the same thing as knowing what a change in the genome actually does. The model can tell you that something shifts. It cannot tell you why, or what the biological story behind it is. That gap between prediction and understanding is not a footnote. It is the whole reason biological fluency still matters even when the AI is very good.
We cover what AlphaGenome gets right, where it quietly breaks, and what you can and cannot trust it for if you work with genomic data yourself.
No background needed. Recording goes up here at 7pm Sydney, free to watch. Just head over the to Classroom and click on “Journal Club” or click on this link (https://www.skool.com/biology-unlocked-7569/classroom/becc80e4?md=13cb2db885b94e94b7360e549df8f738) to watch!
Paper: Avsec et al. (2026). Advancing regulatory variant effect prediction with AlphaGenome. Nature 649, 1206–1218.
DOI: 10.1038/s41586-025-10014-0
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Journal Club No. 05 drops tonight at 7pm Sydney.
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