General
DNA Analysis with Claude and Google AlphaGenome
Two videos blew my mind this week, while working on research.
The first one shows AlphaGenome — DeepMind's new model that predicts how single DNA mutations affect gene regulation. Sounds dry, but here's what got me: 98% of our genome is non-coding DNA, the part that doesn't make proteins. For decades, it was basically unreadable. AlphaGenome now takes up to one million base pairs as input and tells you what happens when a single letter changes — gene expression, RNA splicing, chromatin structure, all at once. It beat 24 out of 26 specialized models in benchmarks. And as of last week, the code is open source.
The second video shows someone uploading their raw Ancestry DNA file into Claude Code. The system spins up virtual experts for different parts of the genome and delivers personalized health insights. The guy finds out he actually has a gene for faster caffeine metabolism — something he'd been joking about for years.
We're at a point where AI isn't just summarizing papers about genetics anymore. It's starting to interpret actual genomes. This is moving faster than I expected.