Computational imaging system for transmission electron microscopy, a start-to-finish open-source cryo-EM image processing software platform
Arguably the most important step in the cryo-EM workflow, image processing can be daunting — but it doesn’t have to be.
cisTEM is user-friendly software to process cryo-EM images of macromolecular complexes and obtain high-resolution 3D reconstructions from them. Maintained and continually advanced by the Grant Lab at the Morgridge Institute for Research and University of Wisconsin–Madison, cisTEM was originally developed by Tim Grant, Alexis Rohou and Nikolaus Grigorieff and comprises a number of tools to process image data, including movies, micrographs, and stacks of single-particle images. The complete pipeline of processing steps required to obtain high-resolution single-particle reconstructions can be achieved with cisTEM.
cisTEM is distributed under the Janelia Research Campus Software License and can be downloaded here. We recommend downloading and using the pre-compiled binaries, rather than compiling the source code, for best performance. New users are encouraged to follow the tutorial, which provides a quick way to become familiar with the most important functions of cisTEM.
cisTEM also serves as the Grant Lab’s platform for developing novel image processing algorithms and techniques, which are also made freely available and open source. For example, you can read about recent extensions of cisTEM for nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy spectra here and for technically challenging heterogeneous tubular samples here.