Urdnet: A Cryo-EM Particle Automatic Picking Method

Cryo-Electron Microscopy (Cryo-EM) images are characterized by the low signal-to-noise ratio, low contrast, serious background noise, more impurities, less data, difficult data labeling, simpler image semantics, and relatively fixed structure, while U-Net obtains low resolution when downsampling rate information to complete object category recognition, obtains high resolution information during upsampling to complete precise segmentation and positioning, fills in the underlying information through skip connection to improve the accuracy of image segmentation, and has advantages in biological image processing like Cryo-EM image. This article proposes A U-Net based residual intensive neural network (Urdnet), which combines point-level and pixel-level tags, used to accurately and automatically locate particles from cryo-electron microscopy images, and solve the bottleneck that cryo-EM Single-particle biological macromolecule reconstruction requires tens of thousands of automatically picked particles. The 80S ribosome, HCN1 channel and TcdA1 toxin subunits, and other public protein datasets have been trained and tested on Urdnet. The experimental results show that Urdnet could reach the same excellent particle picking performances as the mainstream methods of RELION, DeepPicker, and acquire the 3D structure of picked particles with higher resolution.

Automated summary

This article proposes a U-Net based residual intensive neural network (Urdnet) for automatically locating particles from cryo-electron microscopy images. The experimental results show that Urdnet can achieve excellent particle picking performances comparable to mainstream methods and obtain higher resolution 3D structures of the picked particles.