Cryo-RALib -- a modular library for accelerating alignment in cryo-EM

Thanks to automated cryo-EM and GPU-accelerated processing, single-particle cryo-EM has become a rapid structure determination method that permits capture of dynamical structures of molecules in solution, which has been recently demonstrated by the determination of COVID-19 spike protein in March, shortly after its breakout in late January 2020. This rapidity is critical for vaccine development in response to emerging pandemic. This explains why a 2D classification approach based on multi-reference alignment (MRA) is not as popular as the Bayesian-based approach despite that the former has advantage in differentiating subtle structural variations under low signal-to-noise ratio (SNR). This is perhaps because that MRA is a time-consuming process and a modular GPU-acceleration package for MRA is still lacking. Here, we introduced a library called Cryo-RALib that contains GPU-accelerated modular routines for accelerating MRA-based classification algorithms. In addition, we connect the cryo-EM image analysis with the python data science stack so as to make it easier for users to perform data analysis and visualization. Benchmarking on the TaiWan Computing Cloud (TWCC) container shows that our implementation can accelerate the computation by one order of magnitude. The library has been made publicly available at https://github.com/phonchi/Cryo-RAlib.