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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton
@adamauton.bsky.social
820 followers 240 following 25 posts
Geneticist @ 23andMe
Posts Media Videos Starter Packs
adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Jul 2
The brilliant Sarah Senk, together with Taiyo Inoue, has just launched a podcast that explores the implications of AI for higher education: My Robot Teacher. Please give it a listen! #MyRobotTeacher #HigherEd www.youtube.com/watch?v=H2Ta...
How Professors Are Responding to AI: Resistance Is Futile (and Brief) | My Robot Teacher Episode 1
YouTube video by My Robot Teacher
www.youtube.com
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Reposted by Adam Auton
newcastleunited.com
Newcastle United @newcastleunited.com · Mar 16
YOUR 2024/25 CARABAO CUP WINNERS 😍
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Reposted by Adam Auton
blogeman.bsky.social
Brandon Logeman @blogeman.bsky.social · Feb 15
On the x-axis is every human gene, ranked by number of publications containing mention of the gene name. Lots left to discover...
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Jan 21
We're hiring a postdoc to help shape our autism research program; please consider applying.

www.23andme.com/careers/jobs...
Postdoc - Autism Research – 23andMe Careers
Read about our mission-based culture, look up open positions and check out the perks of working here.
www.23andme.com
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Reposted by Adam Auton
shoaclarke.bsky.social
Shoa Clarke @shoaclarke.bsky.social · Jan 20
"the science of extreme longevity continues as an immense joke."

www.nytimes.com/2025/01/20/o...
Opinion | The Science of Blue Zones and Extreme Longevity Is Deeply Flawed
Some of the claims behind the longest-lived people are simply improbable.
www.nytimes.com
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Reposted by Adam Auton
adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Jan 16
We're looking for a talented statistical geneticist to come work with us!
www.23andme.com/careers/jobs...
Scientist / Senior Scientist, Statistical Genetics – 23andMe Careers
Read about our mission-based culture, look up open positions and check out the perks of working here.
www.23andme.com
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Jan 16
We're looking for a talented statistical geneticist to come work with us!
www.23andme.com/careers/jobs...
Scientist / Senior Scientist, Statistical Genetics – 23andMe Careers
Read about our mission-based culture, look up open positions and check out the perks of working here.
www.23andme.com
4 5
Reposted by Adam Auton
brent-richards.bsky.social
Brent Richards @brent-richards.bsky.social · Jan 14
Humans tend to inherently believe that context matters. But context doesn’t seem to matter all that much in genetics.

Epistasis between mutations doesn’t seem to influence their stability in this amazing saturation mutagenesis paper.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Site-saturation mutagenesis of 500 human protein domains - Nature
Large-scale experimental analysis of Human Domainome 1, a library containing more than 500,000 missense mutation variants across more than 500 human protein domains, reveals that 60% of pathogenic mis...
www.nature.com
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Reposted by Adam Auton
ericfauman.bsky.social
Eric Fauman (he/him) @ericfauman.bsky.social · Jan 7
So given that, can you spot the error right at the start of this Wikipedia article on HERC2?

"HERC2 is a giant E3 ubiquitin protein ligase, implicated in DNA repair regulation, pigmentation and neurological disorders."
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Dec 4
🙋‍♂️
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Reposted by Adam Auton
cmhmaliani.bsky.social
Carlos M Herrera @cmhmaliani.bsky.social · Dec 2
Good news, Altmetric has now started watching BlueSky for mentions of publications. And by the way, provides an easy comparison between this and the old site for a recent preprint of mine which I posted simultaneousl at both. Numbers speak by themselves !
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Nov 12
Yesterday was a hard day at 23andMe, and we said goodbye to a number of tremendously talented colleagues. If people have job openings in the genetics space that they'd like me to share with the impacted folks, please do post here.
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Reposted by Adam Auton
madhupai.bsky.social
Madhu Pai, MD, PhD @madhupai.bsky.social · Nov 7
Today seems like a good day to share this Scientific American story on how vaccines have saved more lives throughout history than any other intervention

www.scientificamerican.com/article/see-...
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Nov 5
Hello #ASHG 2024!
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Reposted by Adam Auton
jkpritch.bsky.social
Jonathan Pritchard @jkpritch.bsky.social · Nov 1
I want to try something new at #ASHG24 this year: I'm going to block some time on Friday afternoon to meet with any trainees who would be interested to chat on any topic.
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Oct 25
We demand examples!
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Reposted by Adam Auton
biotobi.bsky.social
Tobias Lenz @biotobi.bsky.social · Oct 24
Long COVID #GWAS preprint identifies #HLA class II associations | #23andMe www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
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Reposted by Adam Auton
michelnivard.bsky.social
Michel Nivard @michelnivard.bsky.social · Sep 19
I made a starter pack full of statistical genetics (adjacent) scientists. it covers all flavours of behaviour, psychiatric, social science and population genetics people. One click follow all of em! let me know if I missed key people!
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Sep 19
Thank you! Super useful.
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Jun 3
A super fun project. Congrats to Suyash Shringarpure, Wei Wang, Sotiris Karagounis, Xin Wang, Anna Reisetter, and Aly Khan on getting this out the door. Feedback very welcome!

www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
Large language models identify causal genes in complex trait GWAS
medRxiv - The Preprint Server for Health Sciences
www.medrxiv.org
adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Jun 3
Definitely a fun result that I would not have expected! It's very early days, but it is exciting to think how LLM approaches could be combined with approaches that rely on functional data to incorporate prior knowledge of biology. Could we get the best of both worlds?
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Jun 3
Interestingly, you can probe the internal embeddings of these models, and we found that the causal genes tend to be 'proximal' to the phenotypes that they influence in embedding space. So they do seem to be learning some relationship between these two concepts.
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Jun 3
Nonetheless, the LLMs also have biases; they tend to favor genes with lots of existing literature, which perhaps isn't surprising given how they're trained. They also struggle to identify causal genes in loci containing large numbers of genes.
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Jun 3
We found this really surprising; and worried that the LLMs had been trained using the truth data. However, we tried to use benchmark data that was curated after the LLM training period as well as a benchmark dataset not available on the internet.
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton @adamauton.bsky.social · Jun 3
The answer appears to be yes! In fact, using a *really simple* approach, LLMs appear to outperform state-of-the-art methods at identifying the causal gene in a variety of 'gold standard' truth datasets!
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