Haruspex: A Neural Network for the Automatic Identification of Oligonucleotides and Protein Secondary Structure in Cryo-Electron Microscopy Maps

In recent years, three-dimensional density maps reconstructed from single particle images obtained by electron cryo-microscopy (cryo-EM) have reached unprecedented resolution. However, map interpretation can be challenging, in particular if the constituting structures require de-novo model building or are very mobile. Herein, we demonstrate the potential of convolutional neural networks for the annotation of cryo-EM maps: our network Haruspex has been trained on a carefully curated set of 293 experimentally derived reconstruction maps to automatically annotate RNA/DNA as well as protein secondary structure elements. It can be straightforwardly applied to newly reconstructed maps in order to support domain placement or as a starting point for main-chain placement. Due to its high recall and precision rates of 95.1 % and 80.3 %, respectively, on an independent test set of 122 maps, it can also be used for validation during model building. The trained network will be available as part of the CCP-EM suite.