A novel constrained reconstruction model towards high-resolution subtomogram averaging

Renmin Han, Lun Li, Peng Yang, Fa Zhang, Xin Gao

Abstract: Electron tomography (ET) offers a unique capacity to image biological structures in situ. However, the resolution of ET reconstructed tomograms is not comparable to that of the single-particle cryo-EM. If many copies of the object of interest are present in the tomograms, their structures can be reconstructed in the tomogram, picked, aligned and averaged to increase the signal-to-noise ratio and improve the resolution, which is known as the subtomogram averaging. To date, the resolution improvement of the subtomogram averaging is still limited because each reconstructed subtomogram is of low reconstruction quality due to the missing wedge issue.