Google DeepMind releases AlphaGenome 2, a genetic AI model that predicts variant effects by cell type

Google DeepMind has unveiled AlphaGenome 2, a successor to last year's AlphaGenome that predicts how genetic variants affect individual cell types and states rather than broad tissue averages. Trained on more than 100 million individual cell profiles across 68 tissues, the model identifies nearly twice as many variants that can change gene expression as the previous state-of-the-art model, and can make predictions about new cell types and biological states without retraining. Google is offering it for non-commercial research via the AlphaGenome API from today, with a limited private preview for commercial use; DeepMind's Žiga Avsec said its finer predictions are more computationally expensive, so it will not replace AlphaGenome soon.