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Science at the Edge 11:30 BPS 1400 Amit Singer Title: Mathematics for Cryo-Electron Microscopy Abstract: Single particle cryo-EM recently joined X-ray crystallography and nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy as a high-resolution structural method for biological macromolecules (the 2017 Nobel Prize in Chemistry). Furthermore, cryo-EM has the potential to analyze compositionally and conformationally heterogeneous mixtures and, consequently, can be used to determine the structures of complexes in different functional states. The 3D-structure and the possible structural variability need to be determined from many noisy two-dimensional tomographic projections, whose viewing directions and in-plane rotations are unknown. In this lecture, the speaker will give an overview of the computational challenges in cryo-EM analysis and how he and others are trying to face them, focusing on 3D ab-initio modelling and the heterogeneity problem of determining structural variability. Lerena R. Heintzelman Department of Physics & Astronomy Michigan State University 567 Wilson Rd. Room 3261 East Lansing, MI 48824 517-884-5513