Formal uniqueness in Ewald sphere corrected single particle analysis

Abstract

In single particle analysis (SPA), the task is to recover the scattering potential of a macromolecular structure from cryo-electron microscope images of many copies of the structure in unknown orientations. The idealized, noise-free SPA inverse problem has been shown to be uniquely solvable - up to hand - when the forward model is based on the ray transform. More accurate forward models take the non-zero curvature of the Ewald sphere into account. We analyze an Ewald sphere corrected forward model for SPA and use the diffraction slice theorem to prove that the corresponding inverse problem is uniquely solvable, including the hand of the structure.