High resolution single particle refinement in EMAN2.1

EMAN2.1 is a complete image processing suite for quantitative analysis of grayscale images, with a primary focus on transmission electron microscopy, with complete workflows for performing high resolution single particle reconstruction, 2-D and 3-D heterogeneity analysis, random conical tilt reconstruction and subtomogram averaging, among other tasks. In this manuscript we provide the first detailed description of the high resolution single particle analysis pipeline and the philosophy behind its approach to the reconstruction problem. High resolution refinement is a fully automated process, and involves an advanced set of heuristics to select optimal algorithms for each specific refinement task. A gold standard FSC is produced automatically as part of refinement, providing a robust resolution estimate for the final map, and this is used to optimally filter the final CTF phase and amplitude corrected structure. Additional methods are in place to reduce model bias during refinement, and to permit cross-validation using other computational methods. (C) 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.