Tracing low-level structures in cryo-electron tomography

Pelayo Alvarez Brecht, Francisco Aguilar-Martínez, Christian Biertümpfel, Irene Diaz, Naoko Mizuno and Antonio Martinez-Sanchez

PLOS ONE, 2025, vol. 20, issue 12, 1-19

Abstract: Cryo-electron tomography is an imaging technique that provides 3D images (tomograms) in situ of cells with sub-nanometer resolution. Typically, the first step in the analysis is to classify the tomogram voxels into different structures, named semantic segmentation. However, the segmentation results are sets of voxels, hindering further quantitative analysis. In this paper, we define and implement algorithms to convert the semantic segmentation of the main structures in a cellular cryo-electron tomogram (membranes, filaments, cytosolic and membrane-bound macromolecules) into specific skeletons, preserving their topological and geometrical information. Additionally, we have defined a metric for comparing segmentations in cryo-ET coming from different methods more robust than the standard DICE. We also demonstrate how this approach can be used to trace cellular features by analyzing several in situ cellular cryo-electron tomograms.

Date: 2025
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:plo:pone00:0338502

DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0338502

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