The GoldX Fiducial Eraser

Abstract

Gold nanoparticles with sizes in the range of 5–15 nm are a standard method of providing fiducial markers to assist with alignment during reconstruction in cryogenic electron tomography. However, due to their high electron density and resulting contrast when compared to standard cellular or biological samples, they introduce artifacts such as streaking in the reconstructed tomograms. Here, we demonstrate a tool that automatically detects these nanoparticles and suppresses them by replacing them with a local background as a post-processing step, providing a cleaner tomogram without removing any sample relevant information or introducing new artifacts or edge effects from uniform density replacements.