Highly scalable methods for exploiting a label with unknown location in order to orient a set of single-particle cryo electron microscopy images

摘要

A highly scalable method for determining the projection orientation of each image in a set of cryo electron microscopy images of a labeled particle is proposed. The method relies on the presence of a label that is a sufficiently strong scatterer such that its 2-D location in each image can be restricted to at most a small number of sites by processing applied to each image individually. It is not necessary to know the 3-D location of the label on the particle. After first determining the possible locations of the label in the 2-D images in parallel, the information from all images is fused to determine the 3-D location of the label on the particle and then the 3-D location is used to determine the projection orientation for each image by processing each image individually. With projection orientations, many algorithms exist for computing the 3-D reconstruction. The performance of the algorithm is studied as a function of the label SNR.