Quanquan Gu
Head of AI for Drug Design, ByteDance Research
Date and time: Mar 6th, 2024
Wednesday, at 8am PST / 11am EST / 4pm GMT / 5pm CET / 12am China
For the zoom and gather.town links, please join the One World Cryo-EM mailing list.
CryoSTAR: Leveraging Structural Prior and Constraints for Cryo-EM Heterogeneous Reconstruction
Resolving conformational heterogeneity in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) datasets remains a significant challenge in structural biology. Previous methods have often been restricted to working exclusively on volumetric densities, neglecting the potential of incorporating any pre-existing structural knowledge as prior or constraints. In this talk, I will present a novel methodology, cryoSTAR, that harnesses atomic model information as structural regularization to elucidate such heterogeneity. Our method uniquely outputs both coarse-grained models and density maps, showcasing the molecular conformational changes at different levels. Validated against four diverse experimental datasets, spanning large complexes, a membrane protein, and a small single-chain protein, our results consistently demonstrate an efficient and effective solution to conformational heterogeneity with minimal human bias. By integrating atomic model insights with cryo-EM data, cryoSTAR represents a meaningful step forward, paving the way for a deeper understanding of dynamic biological processes. This is joint work with Yilai Li, Yi Zhou, Jing Yuan and Fei Ye.
More graphics are available at: https://bytedance.github.io/cryostar/.