Accurate proteome-wide missense variant effect prediction with AlphaMissense

🤖 Plain-English Summary

The vast majority of missense variants observed in the human genome are of unknown clinical significance. The average pathogenicity score of genes is also predictive for their cell essentiality, capable of identifying short essential genes that existing statistical approaches are underpowered to detect.

🔑 Key Findings

• We present AlphaMissense, an adaptation of AlphaFold fine-tuned on human and primate variant population frequency databases to predict missense variant pathogenicity.
• By combining structural context and evolutionary conservation, our model achieves advanced results across a wide range of genetic and experimental benchmarks, all without explicitly training on such data.
• The average pathogenicity score of genes is also predictive for their cell essentiality, capable of identifying short essential genes that existing statistical approaches are underpowered to detect.

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