A max-cut approach to heterogeneity in cryo-electron microscopy

Understand

The field of cryo-electron microscopy has made astounding advancements in the past few years, mainly due to advancements in electron detectors' technology.

• Yet, one of the key open challenges of the field remains the processing of heterogeneous data sets, produced from samples containing particles at several different conformational states.
• For such data sets, the algorithms must include some classification procedure to identify homogeneous groups within the data, so that the images in each group correspond to the same underlying structure.
• The fundamental importance of the heterogeneity problem in cryo-electron microscopy has drawn many research efforts, and resulted in significant progress in classification algorithms for heterogeneous data sets.