Constructing of molecular structural models from Cryo-Electron Microscopy
(Cryo-EM) density volumes is the critical last step of structure determination
by Cryo-EM technologies. Methods have evolved from manual construction by
structural biologists to perform 6D translation-rotation searching, which is
extremely compute-intensive. In this paper, we propose a learning-based method
and formulate this problem as a vision-inspired 3D detection and pose
estimation task. We develop a deep learning framework for amino acid
determination in a 3D Cryo-EM density volume. We also design a sequence-guided
Monte Carlo Tree Search (MCTS) to thread over the candidate amino acids to form
the molecular structure. This framework achieves 91% coverage on our newly
proposed dataset and takes only a few minutes for a typical structure with a
thousand amino acids. Our method is hundreds of times faster and several times
more accurate than existing automated solutions without any human intervention.Comment: 8 pages, 5 figures, 4 table