Metadata-Based Analysis of Image Quality for Single Particle Cryo-EM

DASHH Doctoral Researcher: Anna Theresa Cavasin

Supervisors: Prof. Michael Kolbe (HZI, UHH), Prof. Holger Stark (MPI for Multidisciplinary Sciences), Prof. Matthias Rarey (UHH)

Single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is an increasingly important method for determining the three-dimensional structure of proteins. For this purpose, molecules in aqueous solution are rapidly frozen and then analyzed by transmission electron microscopy. This produces thousands to millions of very noise 2D projection views of the protein of interest which are then processed in computationally intensive pipelines to finally reconstruct a 3D density map. The aim of this project is to develop filtering methods to exclude low quality 2D images based on metadata collected in the reconstruction workflow in order to improve resolution and quality of the 3D reconstructions.