Since its conception, atomic force microscopy (AFM) has demonstrated the capability of presenting atomically resolved images of – in principle – any type of surface. Only recently, the field of high-resolution AFM has moved towards measuring truly unknown structures and complex biological molecules. The first images of DNA acquired with AFM demonstrate that this technique is also suitable to study large, three-dimensional biomolecules, and it is clear that this trend is going continue, and potentially even accelerate, as AFM further matures as a technique. Unfortunately, as the field moves into more complex systems, interpretation becomes a vast, often hopeless exploration through all possible molecules, configurations and imaging parameters. In ADAFM we will harness the power of deep learning to provide automatic structural and chemical identification for molecular and bio-molecular systems based on high-resolution AFM imaging.

2022

2026