Technical Report 98-008: Leginon: A System for Fully Automated Acquisition of 1000 Electron Micrographs a Day

Leginon: A System for Fully Automated Acquisition of 1000 Electron Micrographs a Day

C.S. Potter, H. Chu^*, B. Frey, C. Green, N. Kisseberth, T.J. Madden, K. L. Miller, K. Nahrstedt^*, J. Pulokas, A. Reilein, D. Tcheng^**, D. Weber and B. Carragher

Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
405 N. Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801

^* Dept. of Computer Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Urbana, IL 61801

^** National Center for Supercomputing Applications, Urbana, IL 61801

Manuscript submitted to Ultramicroscopy on 10/12/98

We have developed a system to automatically acquire large numbers of acceptable quality images from specimens of negatively stained catalase, a biological protein which forms crystals. In this paper we will describe the details of the system architecture and analyze the performance of the system as compared to a human operator. The ultimate goal of the system if to automate the process of acquiring cryo-electron micrographs.

PACS: 07.78; 07.05.P; 61.16.B; 87.64.Dz

Keywords: Microscopic methods, instrument control, automated data acquisition, three-dimensional electron microscopy

Contents
1. Introduction	2
2. Methods	3
3. Results	4
4. Discussion and Conclusion	5
Acknowledgements	6
References	7

Clinton S. Potter
Imaging Technology Group
Beckman Institute for Advanced Science and Technology
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
405 N. Mathews, Urbana, IL 61801
cpotter@itg.uiuc.edu
Technical Report 98-008

Date Issued: 12 October 1998

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