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Publication Abstract from PubMed

The bacteriophage T4 contractile tail (containing a tube and sheath) was the first biological assembly reconstructed in three dimensions by electron microscopy at a resolution of approximately 35 A in 1968. A single-particle reconstruction of the T4 baseplate was able to generate a 4.1 A resolution map for the first two rings of the tube using the overall baseplate for alignment. We have now reconstructed the T4 tail tube at a resolution of 3.4 A, more than a 1,000-fold increase in information content for the tube from 1968. We have used legacy software (Spider) to show that we can do better than the typical 2/3 Nyquist frequency. A reasonable map can be generated with only 1.5 electrons/A2 using the higher dose images for alignment, but increasing the dose results in a better map, consistent with other reports that electron dose does not represent the main limitation on resolution in cryo-electron microscopy.

Refined Cryo-EM Structure of the T4 Tail Tube: Exploring the Lowest Dose Limit.,Zheng W, Wang F, Taylor NMI, Guerrero-Ferreira RC, Leiman PG, Egelman EH Structure. 2017 Jul 10. pii: S0969-2126(17)30213-7. doi:, 10.1016/j.str.2017.06.017. PMID:28757144^[2]

From MEDLINE®/PubMed®, a database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine.