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Spaghetti Tracer: A Framework For Tracing Semiregular Filamentous Densities In 3d Tomograms, Salim Sazzed, Peter Scheible, Jing He, Willy Wriggers

Computer Science Faculty Publications

Within cells, cytoskeletal filaments are often arranged into loosely aligned bundles. These fibrous bundles are dense enough to exhibit a certain regularity and mean direction, however, their packing is not sufficient to impose a symmetry between—or specific shape on—individual filaments. This intermediate regularity is computationally difficult to handle because individual filaments have a certain directional freedom, however, the filament densities are not well segmented from each other (especially in the presence of noise, such as in cryo-electron tomography). In this paper, we develop a dynamic programming-based framework, Spaghetti Tracer, to characterizing the structural arrangement of filaments in the challenging 3D …