Heterogeneous Reconstructions of Deformable Models in Cryo-Electron Microscopy

Nashed, Y., Peck, A., Martel, J., Levy, A., Koo, B., Wetzstein, G., Miolane, N., Ratner, D., Poitevin, F.

NeurIPS Workshop of Machine Learning for Structural Biology.

Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) provides a unique opportunity to study the structural heterogeneity of biomolecules. Being able to explain this heterogeneity with atomic models would help our understanding of their functional mechanisms but the size and ruggedness of the structural space (the space of atomic 3D cartesian coordinates) presents an immense challenge. Here, we describe a heterogeneous reconstruction method based on an atomistic representation whose deformation is reduced to a handful of collective motions through normal mode analysis.