Astigmatism Research Today is a free monthly online journal that collates and summarizes the latest research about Astigmatism, including details on cornea, retina, treatment, types, signs, tests.

A novel method for improvement of visualization of power spectra for sorting cryo-electron micrographs and their local areas.

Jonić S, Sorzano CO, Cottevieille M, Larquet E, Boisset N

Institut de Minéralogie et de Physique des Milieux Condensés, Université Pierre et Marie Curie, UMR 7590, CNRS, P7, IPG, 140 rue de Lourmel, 75015 Paris, France. Slavica.Jonic@impmc.jussieu.fr

In a context of automation of cryo-electron microscopy, we developed a novel method for improving visibility of diffraction rings in the power spectra of cryo-electron micrographs of vitreous ice (without carbon film or high concentration of diffracting material). We used these enhanced spectra to semi-automatically detect and remove micrographs and/or local areas introducing errors in the global 3D map (drifted and charged areas) or those unable to increase global signal-to-noise ratio (non-diffracting areas). Our strategy also allows a detection of micrographs/areas with a strong astigmatism. These images should be removed when using algorithms that do not correct astigmatism. Our sorting method is simple and fast since it uses the normalized cross-correlation between enhanced spectra and their copies rotated by 90 degrees. It owes its success mainly to the novel pre-processing of power spectra. The improved visibility also allows an easier visual check of accuracy of sorting. We show that our algorithm can even improve the visibility of diffraction rings of cryo-electron micrographs of pure water. Moreover, we show that this visibility depends strongly on ice thickness. This algorithm is implemented in the Xmipp (open-source image processing package) and is freely available for implementation in any other software package.

Published 15 December 2006 in J Struct Biol, 157(1): 156-67.
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