ArticleProceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America2013
Avoiding the pitfalls of single particle cryo-electron microscopy: Einstein from noise.
Article in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America, 2013. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 107 papers.
What it found
Each row is one number read from the abstract, on the scale the paper reported it, with its interval. Left of the dashed line favours the treatment, right favours the comparator. Under each row is the sentence it came from. New to these charts? A ten-minute tutorial.
The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
The trial behind it
Trials whose registry record cites this paper, or whose number appears in the abstract. A trial that started after this paper was published is citing it as background, not reporting it.
Neither the registry nor the abstract names a trial number. If this is a trial report, that itself is worth knowing.
Who cites it
107 citing papers in PubMed.
- Visualization of membrane-stabilized SorCS2Journal of structural biology: X · 2026Article
- Prothrombinase processivity is conferred by substrate allostery.The EMBO journal · 2026Article
- Visual exoproteomics ofbioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2026Article
- Bayesian perspective for orientation determination in cryo-EM with application to structural heterogeneity analysis.Acta crystallographica. Section D, Structural biology · 2026Article
- CryoSIP: unleashing protein high-resolution Cryo-EM via semantic-instance collaborative picking.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2026Article
- Adeno-associated virus serotype 9 structural heterogeneity and stability characterized by charge detection mass spectrometry.Molecular therapy. Methods & clinical development · 2025Article
- Bayesian Perspective for Orientation Determination in Cryo-EM with Application to Structural Heterogeneity Analysis.bioRxiv : the preprint server for biology · 2025Article
- One-step nanoscale expansion microscopy reveals individual protein shapes.Nature biotechnology · 2025Article
- Self-supervised learning for generalizable particle picking in cryo-EM micrographs.Cell reports methods · 2025Article
- CryoPROS: Correcting misalignment caused by preferred orientation using AI-generated auxiliary particles.Nature communications · 2025Article
- Review
- DynaMight: estimating molecular motions with improved reconstruction from cryo-EM images.Nature methods · 2024Article
- Four Parallel Pathways in T4 Ligase-Catalyzed Repair of Nicked DNA with Diverse Bending Angles.Advanced science (Weinheim, Baden-Wurttemberg, Germany) · 2024Article
- Use of phase plate cryo-EM reveals conformation diversity of therapeutic IgG with 50 kDa Fab fragment resolved below 6 Å.Scientific reports · 2024Article
- Article
- Article
- A kinetic model for solving a combination optimization problem in ab-initio Cryo-EM 3D reconstruction.Briefings in bioinformatics · 2024Article
- Article
- Detecting continuous structural heterogeneity in single-molecule localization microscopy data.Scientific reports · 2023Article
- A robust normalized local filter to estimate compositional heterogeneity directly from cryo-EM maps.Nature communications · 2023Article
47 more citing papers are in PubMed but not listed here.
Corrections and comments
- Commented on by
- Comment on
Authors and funding
1 author.
Funding
Abstract
Single particle cryo-electron microscopy is currently poised to produce high-resolution structures of many biological assemblies, but several pitfalls can trap the unwary. This critique highlights one problem that is particularly relevant when smaller structures are being studied. It is known as "Einstein from noise," in which the experimenter honestly believes they have recorded images of their particles, whereas in reality, most if not all of their data consist of pure noise. Selection of particles using cross-correlation methods can then lead to 3D maps that resemble the model used in the initial selection and provide the illusion of progress. Suggestions are given about how to circumvent the problem.
Indexed as
Identifiers
What OpenQuestion holds
Registered trials
Read under generation 80e0d062 · epoch 390. Bibliography from PubMed, PubMed Central and OpenAlex; grants from NIH RePORTER; trial links from ClinicalTrials.gov; estimates, votes and beliefs from the OpenQuestion graph.