Higher resolution in cryo-EM by the combination of macromolecular prior knowledge and image-processing tools

Single-particle cryo-electron microscopy has become a powerful technique for the 3D structure determination of biological molecules. The last decade has seen an astonishing development of both hardware and software, and an exponential growth of new structures obtained at medium-high resolution. However, the knowledge accumulated in this field over the years has hardly been utilized as feedback in the reconstruction of new structures. In this context, this article explores the use of the deep-learning approach deepEMhancer as a regularizer in the RELION refinement process. deepEMhancer introduces prior information derived from macromolecular structures, and contributes to noise reduction and signal enhancement, as well as a higher degree of isotropy. These features have a direct effect on image alignment and reduction of overfitting during iterative refinement. The advantages of this combination are demonstrated for several membrane proteins, for which it is especially useful because of their high disorder and flexibility.