Exploring applications of crowdsourcing to cryo-EM.

Journal of Structural Biology
Jacob BruggemannAndrew I Su

Abstract

Extraction of particles from cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) micrographs is a crucial step in processing single-particle datasets. Although algorithms have been developed for automatic particle picking, these algorithms generally rely on two-dimensional templates for particle identification, which may exhibit biases that can propagate artifacts through the reconstruction pipeline. Manual picking is viewed as a gold-standard solution for particle selection, but it is too time-consuming to perform on data sets of thousands of images. In recent years, crowdsourcing has proven effective at leveraging the open web to manually curate datasets. In particular, citizen science projects such as Galaxy Zoo have shown the power of appealing to users' scientific interests to process enormous amounts of data. To this end, we explored the possible applications of crowdsourcing in cryo-EM particle picking, presenting a variety of novel experiments including the production of a fully annotated particle set from untrained citizen scientists. We show the possibilities and limitations of crowdsourcing particle selection tasks, and explore further options for crowdsourcing cryo-EM data processing.

Citations

May 17, 2019·PLoS Computational Biology·Joanna LengSarah A Harris
Dec 16, 2020·Journal of Structural Biology: X·Benjamin BasantaDanielle A Grotjahn
Jul 1, 2019·Annual Review of Biomedical Data Science·Rhiju DasIngmar H Riedel-Kruse

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Methods Mentioned

BETA
electron microscopy

Software Mentioned

Eterna
Relion
CTFFIND3
Microscopy
Crowdflower
DoG Picker
Amazon Turk
Foldit
AMT
Panoptes

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