Cryo-electron microscopy shapes up

Cohomology of Cryo-Electron Microscopy

The goal of cryo-electron microscopy (EM) is to reconstruct the 3-dimensional structure of a molecule from a collection of its 2-dimensional projected images. In this paper, we show that the basic premise of cryo-EM—patching together 2-dimensional projections to reconstruct a 3-dimensional object—is naturally one of Čech cohomology with SO(2)-coefficients. We deduce that every cryoEM reconstruc...

Mathematics for cryo - electron microscopy

Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) has recently joined X-ray crystallography and NMR spectroscopy as a high-resolution structural method for biological macromolecules. Cryo-EM was selected by Nature Methods as Method of the Year 2015, large scale investments in cryo-EM facilities are being made all over the world, and the Nobel Prize in Chemistry 2017 was awarded to Jacques Dubo...

3D reconstruction and comparison of shapes of DNA minicircles observed by cryo-electron microscopy

We use cryo-electron microscopy to compare 3D shapes of 158 bp long DNA minicircles that differ only in the sequence within an 18 bp block containing either a TATA box or a catabolite activator protein binding site. We present a sorting algorithm that correlates the reconstructed shapes and groups them into distinct categories. We conclude that the presence of the TATA box sequence, which is be...

The Development of Cryo-electron Microscopy

Sinogram Denoising of Cryo-Electron Microscopy Images

Cryo-electron microscopy has recently been recognized as a useful alternative to obtain three-dimensional density maps of macromolecular complexes, especially when crystallography and NMR techniques fail. The three-dimensional model is constructed from large collections of cryo-electron microscopy images of identical particles in random (and unknown) orientations. The major problem with cryo-el...