Direct Atomistic Reconstruction in Homogeneous Cryo-EM Using Protein Geometry Regularization
摘要
Direct reconstruction of macromolecular structures from cryogenic electron microscopy (Cryo-EM) data has shown to be a challenge both in the homogeneous and heterogeneous setting. In this work we propose a new direct reconstruction method based on a combination of recent developments on protein geometry and orientation estimation. Even though this method is set up for the homogeneous setting, we aim to gain insight into challenges that atomistic methods have been facing for the heterogeneous case. In numerical experiments we observe that the method is able to recover the structure to almost inter-atomic resolution from as few as 100 2D Cryo-EM images due to the strong bias the regularizer gives. We conclude this work with a discussion on how the obtained results indicate possibilities and challenges for the generalization to the heterogeneous case.