Work

Low cost, high performance processing of single particle cryo-electron microscopy data in the cloud

Year: 2015

Type: article

Abstract: The advent of a new generation of electron microscopes and direct electron detectors has realized the potential of single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) as a technique to generate high-resolution structures. Calculating these structures requires high performance computing clusters, a resource that may be limiting to many likely cryo-EM users. To address this limitation and facilitate the spread of cryo-EM, we developed a publicly available 'off-the-shelf' computing environment on Amazon's elastic cloud computing infrastructure. This environment provides users with single particle cryo-EM software packages and the ability to create computing clusters with 16-480+ CPUs. We tested our computing environment using a publicly available 80S yeast ribosome dataset and estimate that laboratories could determine high-resolution cryo-EM structures for $50 to $1500 per structure within a timeframe comparable to local clusters. Our analysis shows that Amazon's cloud computing environment may offer a viable computing environment for cryo-EM.

Source: eLife

DOI: 10.7554/elife.06664

Authors: Michael A. Cianfrocco, Andres E. Leschziner

Institution: Harvard University

Language: English

Topic: Advanced Electron Microscopy Techniques and Applications

Subfield: Structural Biology

Field: Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology

Domain: Life Sciences

Open Access status: gold

Estimated APC paid: $2,500

Funders: Howard Hughes Medical Institute, Damon Runyon Cancer Research Foundation, National Institutes of Health, National Institute of General Medical Sciences