Speaker: Miro Astore (CCB)
Topic: What's hiding in the ice? Designing rational benchmarks of heterogeneous cryoEM data.
Abstract: Conventional analysis of single particle cryoEM datasets focuses on the reconstruction of a small number of high resolution structures. These analysis methods typically assume that the underlying molecule is rigid. However, in fact, these molecules exhibit significant conformational flexibility, which is critical to their function. An emerging set of algorithms are being developed to detect and characterise this form of continuous heterogeneity but development of these methods is hindered by a lack of datasets with a known ground truth and a rational means of comparison between methods with disparate latent spaces.
In order to address these challenges we have produced and released two datasets to the methods development and structural biology communities-challenging them to discover the underlying distributions of the imaged molecule. We will discuss the process of curating and releasing this dataset and how we plan to benchmark submissions for this challenge.