Improving Resolution and Resolvability of Single Particle CryoEM using Gaussian Mixture Models

2023/03/31 by Muyuan Chen, Chen, Muyuan, Michael F. Schmid +3 · 3 citations
Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology · Materials Science · #Advanced Electron Microscopy Techniques and Applications #Biomolecules (q-bio.BM) #Electron and X-Ray Spectroscopy Techniques #FOS: Biological sciences #Genomics and Phylogenetic Studies #Quantitative Methods (q-bio.QM)

paper · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2303.18241

openalex publication_date 2023/03/31 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Cryogenic electron microscopy is widely used in structural biology, but its resolution is often limited by the dynamics of the macromolecule. Here, we developed a refinement protocol based on Gaussian mixture models that integrates particle orientation and conformation estimation, and improves the alignment for flexible domains of protein structures. We demonstrated this protocol on multiple datasets, resulting in improved resolution and resolvability, locally and globally, by visual and quantitative measures.

Cited by

• CryoSplat: Gaussian Splatting for Cryo-EM Homogeneous Reconstruction
• Efficient high-resolution refinement in cryo-EM with stochastic gradient descent
• Reconstructing Heterogeneous Biomolecules via Hierarchical Gaussian Mixtures and Part Discovery

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