Artificial intelligence helps unravel the mysteries of DNA
DNA is an extremely long molecule and, like any long piece of string, it can become knotted and tangled in cells. If we want to understand how these knots form and how enzymes called topoisomerases remove them, we need to determine precisely how DNA is intertwined. A team of scientists, including Dušan Račko from the Polymer Institute of the Slovak Academy of Sciences, has succeeded for the first time in determining the structure of individual, complex DNA arrangements directly from cells with nanometer precision.
"We achieved this by developing advanced image data analysis tools that can do in seconds what previously took hours of manual work," explains D. Račko. Molecular simulations also help us understand how DNA interacts with the mica surface during AFM experiments. Thanks to the development of sophisticated models, we can generate thousands of molecular structures to train future AI systems, bringing us closer to a detailed representation and understanding of the topology of complex DNA structures.
Contact: Dušan Račko, Polymer Institute, Slovak Academy of Sciences, dusan.racko@savba.sk
Source and photo: Polymer Institute SAS