AI augments humans to lead them through the (protein) crystal maze

AI can help scientists spot tiny folding protein crystals, and thus one day potentially assist eggheads in designing new drugs, according to a paper published in PLOS One. To demonstrate this form of boffinry is possible, a large team of researchers from academia and industry, including bods at Duke University in the US and Google and British pharmaceutical giant GlaxoSmithKline, built a convolutional neural network to recognize microscopic protein crystals. The project was launched by the Machine Recognition of Crystallization Outcomes (MARCO) initiative, an international effort to collect pictures of protein crystals from X-ray crystallography experiments. Over time, 493,214 images of protein crystals were harvested, and the dataset was shared with Google researchers to train and test the neural network. After testing it on 50,284 images, the system was found to be 94 per cent accurate in detecting the presence of protein crystals in a solution. Proteins are complex molecules made up of a string of amino acids.