Pushing the Resolution Limit by Correcting the Ewald Sphere Effect in Single-particle Cryo-EM Reconstructions

Overview

Journal Nat Commun

Specialty Biology

Date 2018 Apr 21

PMID 29674632

Citations 57

Authors

Dongjie Zhu

Xiangxi Wang

Qianglin Fang

James L Van Etten

Michael G Rossmann

Zihe Rao

Xinzheng Zhang

Affiliations

Soon will be listed here.

Abstract

The Ewald sphere effect is generally neglected when using the Central Projection Theorem for cryo electron microscopy single-particle reconstructions. This can reduce the resolution of a reconstruction. Here we estimate the attainable resolution and report a "block-based" reconstruction method for extending the resolution limit. We find the Ewald sphere effect limits the resolution of large objects, especially large viruses. After processing two real datasets of large viruses, we show that our procedure can extend the resolution for both datasets and can accommodate the flexibility associated with large protein complexes.

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