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Televisualization: An Aid To Collaborative Research In Molecular Structure Biology

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  02 July 2020

M. F. Schmid
Affiliation:
National Center for Macromolecular Imaging and Verna and Marrs McLean Dept, of Biochemistry, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, 77030
P. Matsudaira
Affiliation:
Whitehead Institute for Biomedical Research and Department of Biology, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, MA, 02142
M. T. Dougherty
Affiliation:
National Center for Macromolecular Imaging and Verna and Marrs McLean Dept, of Biochemistry, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, 77030
M. B. Sherman
Affiliation:
National Center for Macromolecular Imaging and Verna and Marrs McLean Dept, of Biochemistry, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, 77030
C. Henn
Affiliation:
Visual Supercomputing, Advanced Technology Center, Silicon Graphics, Cortaillod, Switzerland
W. Chiu
Affiliation:
National Center for Macromolecular Imaging and Verna and Marrs McLean Dept, of Biochemistry, Baylor College of Medicine, Houston, TX, 77030
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Extract

Collaboration between local microscopists and image processing specialists, and their remote biological colleagues, has been hampered by the difficulty of i) transferring the three-dimensional reconstructions of macromolecules resulting from the cryomicroscopy and image processing, ii) viewing the results in a meaningful way, and iii) communicating the results and the interpretations derived therefrom to each other.

The acrosomal process is an intracellular quasi-crystalline organelle in the head of the sperm of the horseshoe crab Limulus polyphemus. It consists of 100 - 130 actin-scruin filaments packed together in a pseudo-hexagonal lattice and is up to 60 μm long with a diameter of 0.1 μm. Scruin-scruin interactions are responsible for cross-linking the actin filaments together in the bundle. Our goal was to reveal interfilament interactions in the bundle. We have taken tilt series images in the electron microscope to reconstruct its three-dimensional structure at 45 Å resolution.

Type
Advances in Remote Microscopy, Instrument Automation and Data Storage
Copyright
Copyright © Microscopy Society of America

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References

1.Tilney, L.G.J. Cell Biol. 64, 289310 (1975).CrossRefGoogle Scholar
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4. Grant support NIH-RR02250, NSF-BIR9412521, NSF-BIR9500098 and NIH-GM52703.Google Scholar