Double-tilt electron tomography

Fidelity of tomographic reconstructions is improved and reconstruction artifacts are reduced, without increasing the number of projections, by combining tilt series taken around two orthogonal axes. Test reconstructions were made from high-voltage EM of rat liver mitochondria in a 0.6 micron thick plastic section. A number of schemes for selecting tilt angles for the projections are compared. A new method for aligning fiducial markers is described. It uses an iterative algorithm to determine the shift, scale, in-plane rotation and tilt angle for each tilt image, enforcing agreement of the expected locations of the fiducial markers in 3D space. These 3D locations are used to find the orientation between two tilt series and to merge both sets of projections.