SPHIRE-crYOLO is a fast and accurate fullyautomated particle picker for cryo-EM
Wagner T, Merino F, Stabrin S, Moriya T, Antoni C, Apelbau A, Hagel P, Sitsel O, Raisch T, Prumbaum D, Quentin D, Roderer D, Tacke S, Siebolds B, Schubert E, Shaikh TR, Lill P, Gatsogiannis C, Raunser S (2019). Communications Biology
doi: doi.org/10.1038/s42003-019-0437.
Selecting particles from digital micrographs is an essential step in single-particle electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM). As manual selection of complete datasets—typically comprising thousands of particles—is a tedious and time-consuming process, numerous automatic particle pickers have been developed. However, non-ideal datasets pose a challenge to particle picking. Here Wagner et al. present the particle picking software crYOLO which is based on the deep-learning object detection system You Only Look Once (YOLO). After training the network with 200–2500 particles per dataset it automatically recognizes particles with high recall and precision while reaching a speed of up to five micrographs per second. Further, we present a general crYOLO network able to pick from previously unseen datasets, allowing for completely automated on-the-fly cryo-EM data preprocessing during data acquisition. crYOLO is available as a standalone program under http://sphire.mpg.de/ and is distributed as part of the image processing workflow in SPHIRE.
![Training and picking in crYOLO. With the YOLO approach the complete micrograph is taken as the input for the CNN. When the image is passed through the network the image is spatially downsampled to a small grid. Then YOLO predicts for each grid cell if it contains the center of a particle bounding box. If this is the case, it estimates the relative position of the particle center inside the cell, as well as the width and height of the bounding box. During training, the network only needs labeled particles. Furthermore, as the network sees the complete micrograph, it learns the context of the particle.](/3875227/original-1585140806.jpg?t=eyJ3aWR0aCI6MjQ2LCJvYmpfaWQiOjM4NzUyMjd9--7152c147fc4d3c14c3886e7b78afa7339fbead91)