IMOD SOFTWARE WORKSHOP

University Of Colorado, Boulder CO

Investigators

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Abstract

This subproject is one of many research subprojects utilizing the resources provided by a Center grant funded by NIH/NCRR. The subproject and investigator (PI) may have received primary funding from another NIH source, and thus could be represented in other CRISP entries. The institution listed is for the Center, which is not necessarily the institution for the investigator. This year, our laboratory hosted a workshop on tomography for 14 visitors from around the country and the world. American participants included people from the Burnham Institute, Harvard University, the Wadsworth Center, Arizona State University, University of California at San Diego, the National Institutes of Health, the University of California at Davis and Brandeis University. Foreign participants included visitors from the University of Manchester, England, two from different Max Planck Institutes, one from the Weizmann Institute in Israel, one from the University of Helsinki, and one from Utrecht. These participants heard lectures by David Mastronarde on the theory and practice of tomography, and they had extensive hands on instruction in the use of IMOD, taking advantage of our graphical user interface, eTomo. Instruction in software use was provided by essentially all members of the laboratory, and thanks to the fact that many participants brought their own high quality laptops, sufficient computational facilities were available for everyone to carry out each of the processes involved in converting a series of tilted views into a 3-D reconstruction. Time was also available for people to use the microscopes to experience serial EM and practice data collection. The responses of our visitors to this workshop were extremely enthusiastic, as indicated both by questionnaires filled out at the time and letters of thanks returned by the participants after they went back to their own laboratories. We are encouraged that this format of approximately 14 visitors is something we can handle well and through it make a real contribution to the dissemination of tomography technology to a variety of other labs.