“Comparative Refinement as a Tool for Structural Validation”

Tuesday, April 28, 2015

“Comparative Refinement as a Tool for Structural Validation”

Stephen Murray, Baylor College of Medicine

The need for structural validation increases as electron cryomicroscopy structures go to a higher resolution. Comparative refinement utilizes the same data set that has already been collected to perform reconstructions in multiple software packages, and this can be used as a tool to perform the needed validation. When it is used in conjunction with other validation techniques, such as tilt-validation or class-average comparison, comparative refinement has the ability to show structural variability due to algorithmic bias. The greatest advantage of comparative refinement versus another validation technique, (e.g. tilt-validation), is that it requires no additional data collection. In this forum we will look at reconstructions of different specimens and examine what comparative refinement demonstrates.