Processing images of helical structures: a new twist

Helical macromolecular assemblies are particularly difficult to study by X-ray diffraction but are quite well suited to analysis by electron microscopy. Most of our information about helical macromolecular assemblies has come from the electron microscope but has been limited to about 25 A resolution. With the use of low-dose electron cryomicroscopy, one can obtain structural data to near atomic resolution on two-dimensional crystals, but the problem is to extract the information from the noise. In this paper we present methods to extract signal from low-dose electron cryomicrographs of helically symmetric structures. We apply these methods to extract 10 A data from the bacterial flagellar filament.