Improving Resolution and Resolvability of Single Particle CryoEM using Gaussian Mixture Models

Abstract

Cryogenic electron microscopy is widely used in structural biology, but the resolution it achieves is often limited by the dynamics of the macromolecule. Here, we developed a refinement protocol based on Gaussian mixture models that integrate particle orientation and conformation estimation, and improves the alignment for flexible domains of protein structures. We demonstrated this protocol on multiple datasets, resulting in improved resolution and resolvability by visual and quantitative measures