{"id":233627,"date":"2026-03-19T03:24:06","date_gmt":"2026-03-19T08:24:06","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/ai-rebuilds-molecules-from-exploding-fragments"},"modified":"2026-03-19T03:24:06","modified_gmt":"2026-03-19T08:24:06","slug":"ai-rebuilds-molecules-from-exploding-fragments","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/2026\/03\/ai-rebuilds-molecules-from-exploding-fragments","title":{"rendered":"AI rebuilds molecules from exploding fragments"},"content":{"rendered":"<p><a class=\"aligncenter blog-photo\" href=\"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog.images\/ai-rebuilds-molecules-from-exploding-fragments.jpg\"><\/a><\/p>\n<p>Researchers at the Department of Energy\u2019s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and collaborating institutions recently built a generative AI model that can recreate molecular structures from the movement of the molecule\u2019s ions after they are blasted apart by X-rays, a technique called Coulomb explosion imaging.<\/p>\n<p>The research, <a href=\"https:\/\/www.nature.com\/articles\/s41467-026-70160-5\" target=\"_blank\">published in <i>Nature Communications<\/i><\/a>, is an important step toward being able to take snapshots of molecules during chemical reactions\u2014an advance that could have important impacts in medicine and industry. The machine learning model closely predicted the geometries of a range of different molecules made of less than ten atoms, paving the way for applying the technique to larger molecules.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe were pretty excited about this,\u201d said Xiang Li, an associate scientist at SLAC\u2019s Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and lead author of the study. \u201cIt is the first AI model built for molecular structure reconstruction from Coulomb explosion imaging.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Researchers at the Department of Energy\u2019s SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and collaborating institutions recently built a generative AI model that can recreate molecular structures from the movement of the molecule\u2019s ions after they are blasted apart by X-rays, a technique called Coulomb explosion imaging. The research, published in Nature Communications, is an important step toward [\u2026]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":427,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,19,6],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-233627","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-biotech-medical","category-chemistry","category-robotics-ai"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233627","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/427"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=233627"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/233627\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=233627"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=233627"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/lifeboat.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=233627"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}