Cryo-tomography Tilt-series Alignment with Consideration of the Beam-induced Sample Motion

Publication date: Available online 3 February 2018 Source:Journal of Structural Biology Author(s): Jose-Jesus Fernandez, Sam Li, Tanmay A.M. Bharat, David A. Agard Recent evidence suggests that the beam-induced motion of the sample during tilt-series acquisition is a major resolution-limiting factor in electron cryo-tomography (cryoET). It causes suboptimal tilt-series alignment and thus deterioration of the reconstruction quality. Here we present a novel approach to tilt-series alignment and tomographic reconstruction that considers the beam-induced sample motion through the tilt-series. It extends the standard fiducial-based alignment approach in cryoET by introducing quadratic polynomials to model the sample motion. The model can be used during reconstruction to yield a motion-compensated tomogram. We evaluated our method on various datasets with different sample sizes. The results demonstrate that our method could be a useful tool to improve the quality of tomograms and the resolution in cryoET.

Source: Journal of Structural Biology - February 3, 2018 Category: Biology Source Type: research