A University of Missouri researcher has created a computer program that can unravel the mysteries of how proteins work together -; giving scientists valuable insights to better prevent, diagnose and treat cancer and other diseases. Jianlin "Jack" Cheng from Mizzou's College of Engineering and his student, Nabin Giri, have developed a tool called Cryo2Struct that uses artificial intelligence (AI) to build the three-dimensional atomic structure of large protein complexes, work recently published in Nature Communications . The model uses data from pictures of frozen molecules captured by powerful microscopes, or cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) images.
"Cryo-EM right now is a revolutionary, key technology for determining large protein structures and assemblies in cells," said Cheng, a Curators' Distinguished Professor of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. But building protein structures from Cryo-EM data is labor intensive and requires a lot of human intervention, making it time-consuming and hard to reproduce. Our technique is fully automated and generates more accurate structures than existing methods.
" Jianlin "Jack" Cheng, Distinguished Professor, Electrical Engineering and Computer Science, University of Missouri-Columbia Predicting proteins To understand the significance of the work you have to know a bit about proteins and the decades-old struggle to understand them. Proteins are the building blocks of life. They start as strings of amino acids that fold into .