AlphaGenome & the RNA world hypothesis | The chemical breakdown podcast

About this episode

This episode discusses the AlphaGenome deep learning model and the RNA world hypothesis related to the origins of life on Earth.

Welcome to our latest podcast series, The chemical breakdown. Each week, we dive deeper into two stories we've covered here at Chemistry World, providing insight into the facts, why you should care, and what it means for the chemistry community. We also give you that week's headlines to keep you up to date with what's happening in the chemistry community. And finally, we'll end each episode with a brief section on what was happening this week in chemistry history. This week, we discuss the new deep learning model AlphaGenome and visit the very beginning of life on Earth with Mason Wakley and Neil Withers. Google DeepMind has released a new deep learning model that can predict the effect of small changes to DNA sequences up to one million base pairs in length. What does this new tech mean for our understanding of the human genome? And, how did life start on Earth, before the first cell came to be? We discuss the RNA world hypothesis and breakdown the chemistry it's built on. You can find more episodes of The chemical breakdown on the Chemistry world podcast feed. We would love to hear your feedback on this new podcast, so if you have any questions or comments please get in touch…

People in this episode

Guests: Mason Wakley, Neil Withers

Topics covered

• AlphaGenome
• RNA world hypothesis
• deep learning
• human genome
• chemistry history

Keywords

• AlphaGenome
• RNA world hypothesis
• deep learning model
• DNA sequences
• chemistry history

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Google DeepMind, Chemistry World

Books & works: The chemical breakdown

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