{"id":229396,"date":"2026-01-20T09:06:34","date_gmt":"2026-01-20T15:06:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/two-harmful-gene-variants-can-restore-function-when-combined-study-reveals"},"modified":"2026-01-20T09:06:34","modified_gmt":"2026-01-20T15:06:34","slug":"two-harmful-gene-variants-can-restore-function-when-combined-study-reveals","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/01\/two-harmful-gene-variants-can-restore-function-when-combined-study-reveals","title":{"rendered":"Two harmful gene variants can restore function when combined, study reveals"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/two-harmful-gene-variants-can-restore-function-when-combined-study-reveals.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Sometimes, in genetics, two wrongs do make a right. A research team has recently shown that two harmful genetic variants, when occurring together in a gene, can restore function\u2014proving a decades-old hypothesis originally proposed by Nobel laureate Francis Crick.<\/p>\n<p>Their study, to be <a href=\"https:\/\/doi.org\/10.1073\/pnas.2516291123\" target=\"_blank\">published<\/a> in the <i>Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences<\/i>, not only experimentally validated this theory but also introduced a powerful artificial intelligence (AI)-driven approach to genetic interpretation led by George Mason University researchers.<\/p>\n<p>The project began when Aim\u00e9e Dudley, a geneticist at the Pacific Northwest Research Institute (PNRI), approached George Mason University Chief AI Officer Amarda Shehu after following her lab\u2019s work on frontier AI models for predicting the functional impact of genetic variation. That conversation sparked a collaboration that married PNRI\u2019s experimental expertise with George Mason\u2019s computational innovation to discover some surprising ways variant combinations can shape human health.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Sometimes, in genetics, two wrongs do make a right. A research team has recently shown that two harmful genetic variants, when occurring together in a gene, can restore function\u2014proving a decades-old hypothesis originally proposed by Nobel laureate Francis Crick. Their study, to be published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, not only [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":396,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[412,1495,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-229396","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-genetics","category-health","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229396","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/396"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=229396"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/229396\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=229396"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=229396"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=229396"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}