Pushing the Limits of Protein Detection: The Role of Machine Learning - CBIRT

The detection of biomolecules at the nanoscale is of great significance in fundamental biology research, just as it is for biomedical investigations. The evolution of techniques for the detection and characterization of biomolecules has resulted in remarkable scale and resolution in terms of the size and mass of the molecules. Scientists from Germany have achieved the remarkable feat of pushing the sensitivity limits of interferometric scattering (iSCAT) microscopy, a label-free optical technique for the detection of proteins. The authors accomplish this using an unsupervised machine-learning algorithm and are able to detect proteins with a mass as low as 10 kDa, which is four times smaller than proteins being detected using earlier techniques. The detection and characterization of nanoscale matter are of utmost importance in the understanding of fundamental biological mechanisms involved in physiological processes as well as in diseases.