NVIDIA and Harvard researchers use AI to make genome analysis faster and cheaper

Scientists from NVIDIA and Harvard have made a huge breakthrough in genetic research. They developed a deep-learning toolkit that is able to significantly cut down the time and cost needed to run rare and single-cell experiments. According to a study published in Nature Communications, the AtacWorks toolkit can run inference on a whole genome, a process that normally takes a little over two days, in just half an hour. It's able to do so thanks to NVIDIA's Tensor Core GPUs. AtacWorks works with ATAC-seq, a well-established method designed to find open areas in the genome of healthy and diseased cells. These "open areas" are subsections of a person's DNA that are used to determine and activate specific functions (think liver, blood or skin cells).