AIScienceTechGoogle’s Atlas of the human genome could pave the way for new treatmentsDeepMind’s new AI-powered tool can learn patterns between DNA changes and our biology.DeepMind’s new AI-powered tool can learn patterns between DNA changes and our biology.by Robert HartSep 8, 2026, 2:00 PM UTCShareGiftImage: GoogleRobert Hart is a London-based reporter at The Verge covering all things AI and a Senior Tarbell Fellow. Previously, he wrote about health, science and tech for Forbes.Google DeepMind has unveiled an AI tool that its scientists claim could help unravel the mysteries of the human genome and transform our understanding of biology, accelerating scientific research and ultimately paving the way for new treatments for diseases.The platform, called AlphaGenome Atlas, contains a “predictive map of every possible DNA letter change in the human genome,” the researchers said in a blog post published on Tuesday.DNA is written in an alphabet of four chemical “letters” — usually shortened to A, C, G, and T — and the human genome contains roughly 3 billion letter pairs. Those letters contain the instructions that make life work, such as how, when, and where genes are switched on and off, and to what degree. Changes to individual letters can be harmless, contribute to ordinary differences between people, or play a role in disease – a major challenge is figuring out which changes matter and how.
It is a tough task as there are roughly 9 billion potential single-letter substitutions.Atlas contains predictions for how each of these 9 billion variants could affect the body at a molecular level, such as changing how much of a particular protein is produced. The researchers call it “the most comprehensive catalogue of how genetic mutations affect molecular biology.” Google says scientists can explore these predictions through a web portal, as a skill in its agentic development platform Antigravity, and through its AlphaGenome interface.To help researchers sift through the billions of possibilities and focus on the mutations that warrant closer attention, Google is also releasing what it calls a Variant Impact Score (AVI), that draws on the company’s other models for predicting the effects of DNA changes. “Now, researchers can rapidly rank variants and interpret their molecular effects at the same time,” the company’s blog said.The project builds on AlphaGenome, an AI model DeepMind unveiled last year to help scientists identify the genetic drivers of disease, as well as AlphaMissence, an earlier tool focused on predicting which small mutations might alter proteins. Atlas goes much further, extending predictions across the genome, including the vast majority of stretches that do not directly code for proteins, but can instead control how genes behave.In a press briefing, Ziga Avsec, DeepMind’s genomics lead, acknowledged that the underlying model — AlphaGenome — had already been released, but said turning its capabilities into a genome-wide catalog took time. “Basically it took us some time to really precompute and also analyze this many variants because the space is so big,” he said.AlphaGenome was trained using public databases of human and mouse genomes, allowing it to learn patterns between DNA changes and biological processes. Applying those predictions to billions of possible variants produced a massive dataset that Google says is roughly 1 petabyte in size.The company says it is making Atlas available to researchers for noncommercial use through its website starting today, and for commercial use on Google Cloud “soon.”Atlas is the latest in a string of efforts from Google to use AI to tackle core problems in science and medicine, coming at a time when DeepMind cofounder Demis Hassabis steps back from running the AI lab to focus on scientific research, including leading drug-discovery spinoff Isomorphic Labs.
The company’s best-known work in this area is AlphaFold, the protein-structure prediction model that won Demis Hassabis and John Jumper the 2024 Nobel Prize in Chemistry. The company has also developed AI tools for predicting the weather, optimizing finding new solutions in computing and mathematics, and assisting researchers through an agentic “co-scientist.”Follow topics and authors from this story to see more like this in your personalized homepage feed and to receive email updates.Robert HartAIGoogleHealthScienceTechMost PopularSix years later, Sony revisits its legendary XM4 headphonesThe real reason your phone is getting more expensiveDIY plug-in solar gains momentum in the USLG TVs caught spying even when offline or on standbyWhat to expect at Apple’s September 9th launch eventAdvertiser Content FromThis is the title for the native ad
