Podcasts · The chemical breakdown & Chemistry in its element

AlphaGenome & the RNA world hypothesis | The chemical breakdown podcast

11 Feb 2026 · 27 min

Welcome to our latest podcast series, The chemical breakdown. Each week, we dive deeper into two stories we've covered here at Chemistry World, providing insight into the facts, why you should care, and what it means for the chemistry community. We also give you that week's headlines to keep you up to date with what's happening in the chemistry community. And finally, we'll end each episode with a brief section on what was happening this week in chemistry history.

This week, we discuss the new deep learning model AlphaGenome and visit the very beginning of life on Earth with Mason Wakley and Neil Withers.

Google DeepMind has released a new deep learning model that can predict the effect of small changes to DNA sequences up to one million base pairs in length. What does this new tech mean for our understanding of the human genome?

And, how did life start on Earth, before the first cell came to be? We discuss the RNA world hypothesis and breakdown the chemistry it's built on.

You can find more episodes of The chemical breakdown on the Chemistry world podcast feed. We would love to hear your feedback on this new podcast, so if you have any questions or comments please get in touch.

This week's stories:

https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/googles-alphagenome-wants-to-do-for-dna-what-alphafold-did-for-proteins/4022824.article

https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/how-rna-reveals-clues-to-lifes-origins-on-earth/4022833.article

Links in the notes 2

• https://www.chemistryworld.com/news/googles-alphagenome-wants-to-do-for-dna-what-alphafold-did-for-proteins/4022824.article
• https://www.chemistryworld.com/features/how-rna-reveals-clues-to-lifes-origins-on-earth/4022833.article

The episode on the publisher’s site ↗ (opens in a new tab)