AuTom-dualx: a toolkit for fully automatic fiducial marker-based alignment of dual-axis tilt series with simultaneous reconstruction

Renmin Han, Xiaohua Wan, Lun Li, Albert F. Lawrence, Peng Yang, Yu Li, Sheng Wang, Fei Sun, Zhiyong Liu, Xin Gao, Fa Zhang

Abstract: Dual-axis electron tomography is an important 3 D macro-molecular structure reconstruction technology, which can reduce artifacts and suppress the effect of missing wedge. However, the fully automatic data process for dual-axis electron tomography still remains a challenge due to three difficulties: (i) how to track the mass of fiducial markers automatically; (ii) how to integrate the information from the two different tilt series; and (iii) how to cope with the inconsistency between the two different tilt series.