Annotating CryoET Volumes: A Machine Learning Challenge

Cryo-electron tomography (cryoET) has emerged as a powerful structural biology tool for understanding protein complexes in their native cellular environments. Presently, 3D volumes of cellular environments can be acquired in the thousands in a few days where each volume provides a rich and complex cellular landscape. Despite numerous innovations, localizing and identifying the vast majority of protein species in these volumes remains prohibitively difficult. Machine learning based methods provide an opportunity to automate the process of labeling and annotating cryoET volumes. Due to current bottlenecks in the annotation process, and a lack of large standardized datasets, training datasets for machine learning algorithms have been scarce. Here, we present a defined “phantom” sample, along with “ground truth” annotations, that will be the basis of a machine learning challenge to bring cryoET and ML experts together and spur creativity to address this annotation problem. We have also set up a cryoET data portal that provides additional diverse sets of annotated 3D volumes from cryoET experts across the world for the machine learning challenge.