Best Practices in the Collection and Processing of CryoEM Data

TOPICAL COLLECTIONS

Guest Editor

Bernard Heymann

National Institutes of Health

Bernard Heymann is a contractor in the Laboratory of Structural Biology Research (LSBR), NIAMS, NIH, involved in many aspects of cryoEM. He is the main originator and developer of the Bsoft package (Bernard’s software package): a freely available software for the processing and interpretation of electron microscopic data. He wrote the first code for Bsoft as part of the European Union funded BioImage database prototype project, a precursor of the Electron Microscopy Databank, where he still frequently consults. He continued development of Bsoft at the NIH, introducing algorithms for processing electron micrographs, many of them a first in the field. These include dealing with the contrast transfer function, single particle analysis, tomographic tilt series alignment, subtomogram averaging, and interpretation of tomograms by segmentation and modeling. To study the maturation of the herpes simplex capsid, he devised one of the first approaches to analyze time-resolved micrographs. Concurrently, he led and contributed to many other structural studies on viruses (influenza virus, human immunodeficiency virus, Salmonella bacteriophage, etc.) and other biomolecular systems (clathrin-coated vesicles, retinoschisin, anti-feeding prophage, etc.). In the cryoEM community, he proposed conventions for image processing and a new validation method. In 2020, he was elected as fellow of the Microscopy Society of America based on developing Bsoft as a resource for the electron microscopy community. He retired in 2020, but as a contractor at the NIH, he continues to advance methods for structure determination and visualizing proteins in their cellular context by electron microscopy.

Collection Overview

Cryo-electron microscopy is becoming the method of choice for solving the structures of biologically important molecules in high resolution. In addition, it offers the ability to understand the conformational variability and dynamics of complex molecular systems crucial to cellular function. Sample preparation for cryoEM is a highly involved topic on its own, which means that once the sample is in the microscope, all care must be taken to collect the best possible micrographs and extract all available information from them.

This collection aims to present state of the art practices in data collection and processing to get the most from precious samples. Specifically, we invite submissions detailing issues in electron microscope setup and alignment, data collection strategies, micrograph assessment and selection, motion-correction, particle picking, particle alignment and classification, 3D reconstruction, and model building. We would ask authors to focus on advances related to obtaining high resolution data, resolving the different states and parts of biomolecules, and validating these results.