The Perfect Milk Machine: How Big Data Transformed the Dairy Industry | The Atlantic
Dairy scientists are the Gregor Mendels of the genomics age, developing new methods for understanding the link between genes and living things, all while quadrupling the average cow’s milk production since your parents were born.
Genome architecture and stability in the Saccharomyces cerevisiae knockout collection | Nature
The completion of the yeast Saccharomyces cerevisiae gene-knockout collection (YKOC) has enabled high-throughput reverse genetics, phenotypic screenings and analyses of synthetic-genetic interactions. Ensuing experimental work has also highlighted some inconsistencies and mistakes in the YKOC, or genome instability events that rebalance the effects of specific knockouts, but a complete overview of these is lacking. Researchers sequenced the whole genomes of nearly all of the 4,732 strains comprising the homozygous diploid YKOC. By extracting information on copy-number variation of tandem and interspersed repetitive DNA elements, they describe the genomic alterations that are induced by its loss.
Recursive Sketches for Modular Deep Learning | Google AI Blog
In “Recursive Sketches for Modular Deep Learning”, recently presented at ICML 2019, researchers explore how to succinctly summarize how a machine learning model understands its input. They do this by augmenting an existing (already trained) machine learning model with “sketches” of its computation, using them to efficiently answer memory-based questions—for example, image-to-image-similarity and summary statistics—despite the fact that they take up much less memory than storing the entire original computation.