An efficient method for validating protein models using electron microscopy data

Cryo-Electron Microscopy is a powerful biophysical technique that is capable of generating 3-dimensional volume images for macromolecular assemblies and machines. De novo protein modeling uses these images to model the biological molecules. In de novo modeling, many candidate structures are generated at intermediate step. The candidates are evaluated conventionally by time-consuming approaches. We introduce an initial version of a geometrical screening method that uses the skeleton of the cryo-EM images to evaluate the candidate structures. A test of ten (10) proteins shows that our method was able to successfully detect good candidates in an efficient way.