New software tools in EMAN2 inspired by EMDatabank map challenge

Publication date: Available online 4 September 2018Source: Journal of Structural BiologyAuthor(s): James M. Bell, Muyuan Chen, Tunay Durmaz, Adam C. Fluty, Steven J. LudtkeAbstractEMAN2 is an extensible software suite with complete workflows for performing high-resolution single particle analysis, 2-D and 3-D heterogeneity analysis, and subtomogram averaging, among other tasks. Participation in the recent CryoEM Map Challenge sponsored by the EMDatabank led to a number of significant improvements to the single particle analysis process in EMAN2. A new convolutional neural network particle picker was developed, which dramatically improves particle picking accuracy for difficult data sets. A new particle quality metric capable of accurately identifying “bad” particles with a high degree of accuracy, no human input, and a negligible amount of additional computation, has been introduced, and this now serves as a replacement for earlier human-biased methods. The way 3-D single particle reconstructions are filtered has been altered to be more comparable to the filter applied in several other popular software packages, dramatically improving the appearance of sidechains in high-resolution structures. Finally, an option has been added to perform local resolution-based iterative filtration, resulting in local resolution improvements in many maps.
Source: Journal of Structural Biology - Category: Biology Source Type: research
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