Imaging the whole internal structure of intact biological cells at nanometre-resolution, by first acquiring a +/- 65 degree tilt series with one-degree tilt increments and then reconstructing this into a tomogram, is now possible in under three hours in your own core imaging facility. Gone are the days when 3D tilt series were collected and then manually reconstructed in a process that took many hours.

A critical step in soft X-ray tomogram reconstruction is tilt series alignment. This step often relies on tracking fiducial markers such as gold nanobeads introduced to the sample before tomogram collection. In the absence of fiducial markers, tilt series alignment becomes challenging. It often involves hundreds of clicks manually tracking sample features to find the tilt series rotation axis.

SiriusXT now employs a fully automated fiducial-less tomogram alignment program abandoning the need to click. The fully automated fiducial-less alignment program was developed by Dr. Axel Ekman, University of Jyväskylä.

This automated tomogram alignment development was funded under the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation programme (No. 101017116, project CoCID).