Cell Reports Methods • Vol 5 • No 7
Self-supervised learning for generalizable particle picking in cryo-EM micrographs
July 2025 • Andreas Zamanos, Panagiotis Koromilas, Giorgos Bouritsas, Panagiotis L. Kastritis, Yannis Panagakis
We present cryoelectron microscopy masked autoencoder (cryo-EMMAE), a self-supervised method designed to overcome the need for manually annotated cryo-EM data. cryo-EMMAE leverages the representation space of a masked autoencoder to pick particle pixels through clustering of the MAE latent representation. Evaluation across different EMPIAR datasets demonstrates that cryo-EMMAE outperforms state-of-the-art supervised methods in terms of generalization capabilities. Importantly, our method showcases consistent perfo…