ELECTRON TOMOGRAPHY OF LARGE, MULTICOMPONENT BIOLOGICAL STRUCTURES

Electron tomography is an extremely useful method for deriving three-d imensional structure from electron microscope images. The application of this technique to the reconstruction of large, complex structures s uch as mitochondria is described in conjunction with several tools for segmentation, measurement, classification, and visualization. In addi tion, the use of massively parallel computers to perform the tomograph ic reconstruction efficiently using R-weighted backprojection or itera tive techniques is described. (C) 1998 Academic Press.