Adam Auton
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adamauton.bsky.social
Adam Auton
@adamauton.bsky.social
Geneticist @ 23andMe
Delighted to see our method, PRSformer, at #NeurIPS2025! PRSformer is AI model for population-scale disease-risk prediction from individual genomes. It lays the groundwork for phenome-wide risk prediction.

www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
PRSformer: Disease Prediction from Million-Scale Individual Genotypes
Predicting disease risk from DNA presents an unprecedented emerging challenge as biobanks approach population scale sizes (N>106 individuals) with ultra-high-dimensional features (L>105 genotypes). Cu...
www.biorxiv.org
October 28, 2025 at 10:23 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
PRSformer: Disease Prediction from Million-Scale Individual Genotypes https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.10.26.684578v1
October 27, 2025 at 6:32 PM
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
July 2, 2025 at 7:50 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
YOUR 2024/25 CARABAO CUP WINNERS 😍
March 16, 2025 at 8:09 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
On the x-axis is every human gene, ranked by number of publications containing mention of the gene name. Lots left to discover...
February 15, 2025 at 3:57 PM
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
January 21, 2025 at 6:21 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
"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
January 20, 2025 at 2:28 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
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
January 16, 2025 at 10:55 PM
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
January 16, 2025 at 10:55 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
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
January 14, 2025 at 12:30 AM
Reposted by Adam Auton
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."
January 7, 2025 at 11:08 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
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 !
December 2, 2024 at 6:35 PM
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.
November 12, 2024 at 5:58 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
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-...
November 7, 2024 at 1:26 AM
Hello #ASHG 2024!
November 5, 2024 at 3:00 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
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.
November 1, 2024 at 12:10 AM
Reposted by Adam Auton
Long COVID #GWAS preprint identifies #HLA class II associations | #23andMe www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
October 24, 2024 at 8:00 AM
Reposted by Adam Auton
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!
September 19, 2024 at 12:07 PM
In the latest edition of "Huh, I didn't expect that to work", our latest paper shows that LLMs can outperform existing methods for identifying causal genes in genome-wide association studies.

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
June 3, 2024 at 3:07 AM
Reposted by Adam Auton
I recently made a comic complaining that NASA refuses to listen to my good ideas for improving the Solar System (xkcd.com/2750).

To my delight, NASA’s Science Mission Directorate has sent me an actual expert panel evaluation of my “flatten the planets” proposal! Sadly, they decided not to fund it.
February 22, 2024 at 2:45 PM
Science making progress on the important questions! www.nature.com/articles/s42...
January 16, 2024 at 6:54 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
A real moonshot project in biomedical research would be a decisive legal, regulatory and IT effort to really make data access work for researchers across the world. It's not as sexy as AI, CRISPR, or ginormous sequencing projects, but more transformative and better bang for the buck.
November 27, 2023 at 1:51 PM
Reposted by Adam Auton
Is there a list of evolutionary “mistakes” but for the genome, not just physiology? That is things that came to be but aren’t good for long term fitness
November 12, 2023 at 2:19 AM
Our paper, showing PRS are predictive of incident disease - not just classifiers of existing disease: www.medrxiv.org/content/10.1...
October 27, 2023 at 5:57 PM