Calendar of Relevant Events at Carnegie Mellon University
Alberto Bartesaghi
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Biochemistry
Algorithm and method development for high-resolution structure determination of protein structure using single-particle cryo-electron microscopy, cryo-electron tomography and sub-volume averaging.
Workflows for high-resolution structure determination by single particle Cryo-EM
Abstract: Recent advances in direct electron detector technology combined with effective strategies for image analysis have enabled the routine use of single particle cryo-Electron Microscopy (EM) to determine the structure of a variety of protein complexes at near-atomic resolution. The increased availability and access to cryo-EM resources within the structural biology community, has highlighted the need for robust and automated workflows for data analysis that can effectively and rapidly convert raw data into 3D structures. Although many components of the data processing pipeline can already run in an unsupervised manner, there are still several steps where user involvement is required in order to produce meaningful structures. The identification of these bottlenecks is the first step towards achieving the ambitious goal of fully automating the structure determination process by cryo-EM. In this talk, I’ll identify some of the roadblocks that stand in the way of full automation in single particle image analysis and discuss strategies for streamlining and establishing robust workflows for high resolution structure determination by cryo-EM.
Associate Professor of Computer Science and Engineering
Associate Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology
My research falls at the interface of biology and theoretical computer science, specifically in problems where rigorous algorithms and analysis can have a demonstrated impact in the biological sciences. My main focus has been on genome assembly and variation detection, though I am interested in a variety of areas such as phylogenetics, graph theory, computational complexity, on-line algorithms, and networking.