Short Article.
Researchers have developed a new AI-driven platform that can analyse how pathogens infect our cells with the precision of a trained biologist.
Scientists at the Francis Crick Institute and UCL use ‘Herman’ (HRMAn), which stands for Host Response to Microbe Analysis which uses deep neural networks to analyse complex patterns in images of pathogen and human (‘host’) cell interactions, achieving the same detailed characteristics that scientists do by-hand.
“What used to be a manual, time-consuming task for biologists now takes us a matter of minutes on a computer, enabling us to learn more about infectious pathogens and how our bodies respond to them, more quickly and more precisely,” says Eva Frickel, Group Leader at the Crick, who led the project. “HRMAn can actually see host-pathogen interactions like a biologist, but unlike us, it doesn’t get tired and need to sleep!”
Researchers in the Crick’s High Throughput Screening facility collected over 30,000 microscope images of five different types of Toxoplasma-infected human cells and loaded them into HRMAn for analysis. HRMAn detected and analysed over 175,000 pathogen-containing cellular compartments, providing detailed information about the number of parasites per cell, the location of the parasites within the cells, and how many cell proteins interacted with the parasites, among other variables.
Link to research; https://elifesciences.org/articles/40560
Article sourced; www.crick.ac.uk