2025Starynska Membrane
Citation
Starynska, A., Cameron, C.J., Sigworth, F.J. and Tagare, H.D. 2026. Automated Membrane Detection and Subtraction for Structure Determination of Membrane Proteins in Cryogenic Electron Microscopy. Proceedings of the IEEE/CVF Conference on Computer Vision and Pattern Recognition (2026), 6553–6562.
Abstract
High-resolution cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) reconstruction of membrane proteins often requires the bilayer membrane containing the protein to be subtracted from the image. We propose a two-step machine learning framework for this task: (1) membrane detection, which identifies the bilayer membrane, and (2) membrane subtraction, which digitally removes the detected membrane from the cryo-EM image. Recent work has introduced algorithms for membrane detection, but membrane subtraction remains relatively underexplored. Here, we present a novel unsupervised approach for membrane subtraction which computes a smooth estimate of the membrane that can be subtracted from the original cryo-EM image. Experimental results show that our method outperforms existing membrane subtraction alternatives and enables reliable 3D reconstruction of membrane proteins.