Robust and ultrafast fiducial marker correspondence in electron tomography by a two-stage algorithm considering local constraints

Renmin Han, Guojun Li, Xin Gao

Abstract: Electron tomography (ET) has become an indispensable tool for structural biology studies. In ET, the tilt series alignment and the projection parameter calibration are the key steps toward high-resolution ultrastructure analysis. Usually, fiducial markers are embedded in the sample to aid the alignment. Despite the advances in developing algorithms to find correspondence of fiducial markers from different tilted micrographs, the error rate of the existing methods is still high such that manual correction has to be conducted. In addition, existing algorithms do not work well when the number of fiducial markers is high.