In California, Google released the open source version of DeepVariant, a deep learning technology to reconstruct the true genome sequence from HTS sequencer data. This work is the product of more than two years of research by the Google Brain team, in collaboration with Verily Life Sciences. This is all part of a broader goal to apply Google technologies to healthcare and other scientific applications, and to make the results of these efforts broadly accessible, according to their press release.
“DeepVariant transforms the task of variant calling, as this reconstruction problem is known in genomics, into an image classification problem well-suited to Google’s existing technology and expertise,” according to their press release. “DeepVariant is being released as open source software to encourage collaboration and to accelerate the use of this technology to solve real world problems.”