Accurate global and local 3D alignment of cryo-EM density maps using local spatial structural features

Abstract

Advances in cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) imaging technologies have led to a rapidly increasing number of cryo-EM density maps. Alignment and comparison of density maps play a crucial role in interpreting structural information, such as conformational heterogeneity analysis using global alignment and atomic model assembly through local alignment. Here, we present a fast and accurate global and local cryo-EM density map alignment method called CryoAlign, that leverages local density feature descriptors to capture spatial structure similarities. CryoAlign is a feature-based cryo-EM map alignment tool, in which the employment of feature-based architecture enables the rapid establishment of point pair correspondences and robust estimation of alignment parameters. Extensive experimental evaluations demonstrate the superiority of CryoAlign over the existing methods in terms of both alignment accuracy and speed.