Structure determination using Cryo-electron microscopy

Abstract: Cryo-electron microscopy is used to acquire two-dimensional projection images of thousands of individual, identical frozen-hydrated macromolecules at random unknown orientations and positions. The goal is to reconstruct the three-dimensional structure with sufficiently high resolution. A major limitation to currently used methods is the extremely low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). I will explain how ideas from tomography, spectral graph theory, representation theory, convex optimization, random matrix theory, and recent advances in fast randomized algorithms play a significant role towards solving the cryo-EM problem.