Near-Atomic Resolution Structure Determination in Over-Focus with Volta Phase Plate by Cs-Corrected Cryo-EM

Volta phase plate (VPP) is a recently developed transmission electron microscope (TEM) apparatus that can significantly enhance the image contrast of biological samples in cryoelectron microscopy, and therefore provide the possibility to solve structures of relatively small macromolecules at high-resolution. In this work, we performed theoretical analysis and found that using phase plate on objective lens spherical aberration (Cs)-corrected TEM may gain some interesting optical properties, including the over-focus imaging of macromolecules. We subsequently evaluated the imaging strategy of frozen-hydrated apo-ferritin with VPP on a Cs-corrected TEM and obtained the structure of apo-ferritin at near-atomic resolution from both under- and over-focused dataset, illustrating the feasibility and new potential of combining VPP with Cs-corrected TEM for high-resolution cryo-EM.