Atom or noise? New method helps cryo-EM researchers tell the difference

Cryogenic electron microscopy, or cryo-EM, has reached the point where researchers could in principle image individual atoms in a 3-D reconstruction of a molecule—but just because they could see those details doesn't always mean they do. Now, researchers at the Department of Energy's SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory and Stanford University have proposed a new way to quantify how accurate such reconstructions are and, in the process, how confident they can be in their molecular interpretations.