Artificial intelligence in the experimental determination and prediction of macromolecular structures

Machine learning methods, in particular convolutional neural networks, have been applied to a variety of problems in cryo-EM and macromolecular crystallographic structure solution. However, they still have only limited acceptance by the community, mainly in areas where they replace repetitive work and allow for easy visual checking, such as particle picking, crystal centering or crystal recognition. With Artificial Intelligence (AI) based protein fold prediction currently revolutionizing the field, it is clear that their scope could be much wider. However, whether we will be able to exploit this potential fully will depend on the manner in which we use machine learning: training data must be well-formulated, methods need to utilize appropriate architectures, and outputs must be critically assessed, which may even require explaining AI decisions.