Author response: Low cost, high performance processing of single particle cryo-electron microscopy data in the cloud
Year: 2015
Type: peer-review
Abstract: Microscopes can be used to view objects or structural details that are not visible with the naked eye. A type of microscope called an electron microscope—which uses beams of particles called electrons—is particularly useful for examining tiny objects or structures because it can produce images with a higher level of detail than microscopes that use light. There are several ways to prepare biological samples for electron microscopy. One technique is called cryo-electron microscopy, or cryo-EM for short, where the sample is rapidly frozen and then viewed under the electron microscope. Using this technique it is possible to produce highly detailed images of viruses, individual compartments within cells and even single proteins. To convert the images of proteins into three-dimensional models, high-performing clusters of computers are required. It can be difficult and expensive for many scientists to access these resources, which may limit the wider use of cryo-EM in research. To address this problem and aid the spread of cryo-EM, Cianfrocco and Leschziner developed a publicly available ‘off the shelf’ system on Amazon's elastic cloud computing infrastructure. This provides users with software packages and the ability to create a cluster containing up to around 480 computers to analyze cryo-EM data. Cianfrocco and Leschziner tested the system using a publicly available cryo-EM dataset of a structure in yeast cells called the 80S ribosome, which contains proteins and molecules of ribonucleic acid. This revealed that a highly detailed model of the 80S ribosome could be developed in a time frame similar to what it would have taken on a local high-performing computing cluster within a university. The cost of using this system was also competitive in price with that of maintaining a local computing cluster, with the added flexibility of its ‘pay-as-you-go’ structure. These findings show that Amazon's cloud computing infrastructure may be a useful alternative to using clusters of computers based within a research institute or university. This will help the spread of cryo-EM as a general tool to reveal the three-dimensional structures of large molecules. Further work is required to make this cloud-based computing tool easily accessible to researchers who may have limited experience with using Linux software and computing clusters.
Authors: Michael A Cianfrocco, Andres E Leschziner
Institution: Harvard University
Language: English
Subfield: Structural Biology
Domain: Life Sciences
Open Access status: gold
OpenAlex ID: W2987904736