UBC Math Department Colloquium: Amit Singer

Single particle cryo-EM is an increasingly popular technique for determining 3-D molecular structures at high resolution. The 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded to three of the pioneers of cryo-EM, and already in the early stages of the global pandemic, cryo-EM was successfully applied to image the SARS-CoV-2 spike protein. We will discuss the mathematical principles and computational methods for reconstruction using cryo-EM, focusing on its sample complexity (i.e., the number images required for reconstruction as a function of the signal-to-noise ratio) and reconstruction of flexible molecules.