Google releases AI tool for understanding the human genome

Google has released DeepVariant, its artificial intelligence (AI) tool, capable of building a person’s genome from sequencing data.

Developed by the Google Brain team and Verily, an Alphabet subsidiary, DeepVariant identifies insertion and deletion mutations and single-base-pair mutations to build an accurate picture of an individual’s genome. Researchers collected data on high-throughput reads and full genomes from the Genome in a Bottle (GIAB) project to train a deep-learning system to accurately present data.

“The success of DeepVariant is important because it demonstrates that in genomics, deep learning can be used to automatically train systems that perform better than complicated hand-engineered systems,” said Brendan Frey, CEO of Deep Genomics.