MEDUSA: A cloud-based tool for the analysis of X-ray diffuse scattering to obtain the bending modulus from oriented membrane stacks

by Sebastian Himbert, Dorian Gaboo, Emre Brookes, John F. Nagle, Maikel C. Rheinst ädter

An important mechanical property of cells is their membrane bending modulus,κ. Here, we introduce MEDUSA (MEmbrane DiffUse Scattering Analysis), a cloud-based analysis tool to determine the bending modulus,κ, from the analysis of X-ray diffuse scattering. MEDUSA uses GPU (graphics processing unit) accelerated hardware and a parallelized algorithm to run the calculations efficiently in a few seconds. MEDUSA ’s graphical user interface allows the user to upload 2-dimensional data collected from different sources, perform background subtraction and distortion corrections, select regions of interest, run the fitting procedure and output the fitted parameters, the membranes’ bending modulusκ, and compressional modulusB.

Source: PLoS Computational Biology - January 8, 2024 Category: Biology Authors: Sebastian Himbert Source Type: research