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Updated: Nov 29, 2025

Author Spotlight: Exploring Cellular Processes by Modeling Ligands in Cryo-EM Maps
Published on: July 19, 2024
qFit 3: Protein and ligand multiconformer modeling for X-ray crystallographic and single-particle cryo-EM density
Blake T Riley1, Stephanie A Wankowicz2,3, Saulo H P de Oliveira4
1Structural Biology Initiative, CUNY Advanced Science Research Center, New York, New York, USA.
Abstract:
New X-ray crystallography and cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) approaches yield vast amounts of structural data from dynamic proteins and their complexes. Modeling the full conformational ensemble can provide important biological insights, but identifying and modeling an internally consistent set of alternate conformations remains a formidable challenge. qFit efficiently automates this process by generating a parsimonious multiconformer model. We refactored qFit from a distributed application into software that runs efficiently on a small server, desktop, or laptop. We describe the new qFit 3 software and provide some examples. qFit 3 is open-source under the MIT license, and is available at https://github.com/ExcitedStates/qfit-3.0.
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