Tech & Scienza
September 15, 2026
GPN-Star: The AI that learns from evolution to decode the human genome
A new artificial intelligence model developed at UC Berkeley, trained on evolutionary comparisons between species, identifies genetic variants linked to diseases more efficiently.
Researchers at UC Berkeley have developed GPN-Star, an innovative genomic language model for artificial intelligence. This tool excels at identifying the most important genetic variants contributing to heritable traits, including those leading to diseases. Unlike previous models, GPN-Star was trained using data from whole genome alignments (WGA) rather than unaligned individual genomes. This approach, which relates the genomes of hundreds of different species to that of a reference species, enables the model to more effectively pinpoint areas of conserved code during evolution. The model offers remarkable computational efficiency, requiring only a fraction of the time and computing resources