Image processing and 3-D reconstruction in electron microscopy (original) (raw)

K nowledge of the structure of biological specimens is critical to understanding their functions at all scales [1] and is crucial in biosciences to complement biochemical studies. Electron microscopy (EM) enables the investigation of the structure of biological specimens over a wide range of sizes, from cellular structures to single macromolecules, providing information at low/medium/high resolution [2], [3] and, in some cases, at atomic resolution . The combination of EM with other high-resolution approaches, e.g., X-ray crystallography or nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR), allows integration of the structural information gathered at multiple levels of the biological complexity into a common framework, which is expected to provide a comprehensive description of the cellular function in molecular detail .