Improving Detection of Secondary Structures within Medium Resolution Cryo-EM Density Maps

Cryo-electron microscopy is a biophysical technique in production of electron density maps that are 3-dimensional images. Although atomic structures can be derived from such images at high-resolution, it is still challenging to predict structures when the resolution of the image is at medium resolutions (5-10Å). Although computational methods are available to extract protein secondary structures from a medium-resolution image, they lack sufficient accuracy for structure prediction. This work aims to improve detection of secondary structures such as helices and β-sheets as compared to previous work SSETracer. Detection of these secondary structures is an important prior step for methods that perform further analysis, such as protein sequencing