CryoChains: Heterogeneous Reconstruction of Molecular Assembly of Semi-flexible Chains from Cryo-EM Images

Koo, B., Martel, J., Peck, A., Levy, A., Poitevin, F., Miolane, N.

We propose CryoChains to encode large deformations of biomolecules via rigid body transformation of their polymer instances (chains), while representing their finer shape variations with the normal mode analysis framework of biophysics. CryoChains gives a biophysically-grounded quantification of the heterogeneous conformations of biomolecules, while reconstructing their 3D molecular structures at an improved resolution compared to the current fastest, interpretable deep learning method.