CryoGAN: A New Reconstruction Paradigm for Single-particle Cryo-EM Via Deep Adversarial Learning
Laurène Donati

Meeting • 27 April 2020

Abstract
In this talk, we present CryoGAN, a new paradigm for single-particle cryo-EM reconstruction based on unsupervised deep adversarial learning. The major challenge in single-particle cryo-EM is that the measured particles have unknown poses. Current reconstruction techniques either estimate the poses or marginalize them away—steps that are computationally challenging. CryoGAN sidesteps this problem by using a generative adversarial network (GAN) to learn the 3D structure whose simulated projections most closely match the real data in a distributional sense. The architecture of CryoGAN resembles that of standard GAN, with the twist that the generator network is replaced by a cryo-EM physics simulator. CryoGAN is an unsupervised algorithm that only demands picked particle images and CTF estimation as inputs; no initial volume estimate or prior training are needed. Moreover, it requires minimal user interaction and can provide reconstructions in a matter of hours on a high-end GPU. The current results on synthetic datasets show that the CryoGAN can reconstruct a high-resolution volume with its adversarial learning scheme. Preliminary results on real β-galactosidase data demonstrate its ability to capture and exploit real data statistics in more challenging imaging conditions. If the time permits, we would also like to discuss its extension for multiple conformations.