Detecting microtubules in high noise Cryo-EM micrograph

Microtubules (MT), a fundamental component in cell structure, have recently been intensively studied in structural biology. Cryo-Electron Microscopy (Cryo-EM) is an effective method to gain insight into MTs´ structure, while detection and segmentation of MTs are still mainly done by human analysis, because of the extremely high noise and massive irrelevant cell structures in Cryo-EM micrographs. Here we present an automated method to extract microtubules from micrographs. Our method is able to: 1. eliminating large contaminants according to their morphology features 2. filter the picture using our newly designed nonlinear filters; 3. finally select microtubules through a threshold of length. Having been tested with a large number of Cryo-EM micrographs, our method is proved to be effective and capable to replace human segmentation work.