arXiv · 2303.02157
Expectation-maximization for structure determination directly from cryo-EM micrographs
Abstract
A single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) measurement, called a micrograph, consists of multiple two-dimensional tomographic projections of a three-dimensional (3-D) molecular structure at unknown locations, taken under unknown viewing directions. All existing cryo-EM algorithmic pipelines first locate and extract the projection images, and then reconstruct the structure from the extracted images. However, if the molecular structure is small, the signal-to-noise ratio (SNR) of the data is very low, making it challenging to accurately detect projection images within the micrograph. Consequently, all standard techniques fail in low-SNR regimes. To recover molecular structures from measurements of low SNR, and in particular small molecular structures, we devise an approximate expectation-maximization algorithm to estimate the 3-D structure directly from the micrograph, bypassing the need to locate the projection images. We corroborate our computational scheme with numerical experiments and present successful structure recoveries from simulated noisy measurements.
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Shay Kreymer, Amit Singer, Tamir Bendory. 2023-02-24. Expectation-maximization for structure determination directly from cryo-EM micrographs. https://arxiv.org/abs/2303.02157
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