CryoSPARC is a state of the art high performance computing (HPC) software solution for complete processing of single-particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) data. Cryo-EM is a recent Nobel Prize-winning technique for 3D reconstruction of proteins and other biological molecules from microscope data and is rapidly becoming the go-to technique for protein structure determination in life-sciences and drug discovery. CryoSPARC’s speed, ease of use and specially designed algorithms for membrane proteins, ion channels, GPCRs and other biological targets have made it a globally-adopted solution for discovering new structures, conformational states and mechanistic insights in academia and industry.
A typical cryo-EM workflow involves biological sample preparation, data collection, and finally computation. Images of a sample are collected with a transmission electron microscope. The raw data, which is generally 5-10 TB in size, is then processed to reconstruct a three-dimensional structure of the protein of interest from the two-dimensional images. Storing the micrographs (images produced by the microscope) requires enormous data storage and the processing workflow requires massive computing power. This workload is therefore an ideal use case for HPC on Amazon Web Services (AWS). Individual labs, pharmaceutical companies, and biotech and contract research organizations can all take advantage of AWS HPC for cryoSPARC, as an alternative or complement to on-premises deployments.
To get started deploying cryoSPARC on AWS, the following resources are available on the cryoSPARC Guide:
- End-to-end deployment guide developed with AWS Solution Architects: https://guide.cryosparc.com/deploy/cryosparc-on-aws
- Performance benchmarks and cost analysis on an example dataset: https://guide.cryosparc.com/deploy/cryosparc-on-aws/performance-benchmarks
- Example scripts and cluster configuration: https://github.com/cryoem-uoft/aws-deployment-guide
The cryoSPARC Guide also features a comprehensive set of cryo-EM data processing tutorials, videos, tips, descriptions of methods and case studies. For questions and help, reach out to the cryoSPARC team on the Discussion Forum (https://discuss.cryosparc.com/) or contact [email protected].