Aisle 4No. 50 of 460
Splashery
Cryo-EM Map
182,762 small parts. Assembled in your browser.
Empty. Now look down.
Swipe across the pack to tear it open.
Press and hold. It pulls itself together.
Let go to drop it.
It stays in its pack here. The Playground has the rest.
Science · Built from a recipe
Cryo-EM Map
Cryo-electron microscopy freezes thousands of copies of a molecule in thin ice, photographs them with electrons and averages the pictures into a 3D map of density.
Play with it in the Playground
How to play
Tap to cut it open; tap again to close it. Pick a map, a level and the fitted model in the Splash tab.
Toy facts
- Item
- No. 50 of 460
- Shelf
- Aisle 4, Science
- Kind
- Built from a recipe
- Small parts
- 182,762
- Your own
- About this map
- Sound
- Yes
- Batteries
- None
- Assembly
- It does that itself
- Licenses
- Public domain
- Price
- $0.00
Small parts are the splats in its usual build on a computer. A phone may draw fewer.
Its controls
| Control | Kind | Range | Start |
|---|---|---|---|
| Cut it open | Tap | ||
| Cut it open | Switch | Off | |
| Map | List | 3 choices | Apoferritin (2.6 Å) |
| Level | List | 3 choices | EMDB's recommended |
| Color by | List | 4 choices | What suits it |
| Fitted atomic model | Setting |
About it
Cryo-electron microscopy freezes thousands of copies of a molecule in thin ice, photographs them with electrons and averages the pictures into a 3D map of density. Scientists look at the map as a surface at one density level and build an atomic model into it.
This splash reads three real maps from the Electron Microscopy Data Bank: apoferritin, a ribosome and a virus shell. It draws the surface at the level EMDB recommends, one small flat splat wherever the density crosses that level, on a grid of about 1 to 1.6 Å voxels that fits a phone. Choose a lower or higher level, color by the fitted model's chains or by distance from the center, and show the model's backbone inside a see-through map. Tap to cut the front half away and see inside. It is for looking, not for measuring or model building.
Sources and credits
| Work | By | License |
|---|---|---|
| Mouse heavy-chain apoferritin by cryo-EM at 100 keV, 2.6 Å (EMD-17961), with its fitted model (PDB 8PVC) | G. McMullan, K. Naydenova, D. Mihaylov et al. (PNAS 120, e2312905120, 2023), via EMDB and the PDB | Public domain (EMDB: free of all copyright restrictions) |
| Arbekacin-bound E. coli 70S ribosome, 3.2 Å (EMD-48329), with its fitted model (PDB 9MKK) | S. Majumdar, N. P. Parajuli, X. Ge, A. Emmerich and S. Sanyal (Scientific Reports 15, 18271, 2025), via EMDB and the PDB | Public domain (EMDB: free of all copyright restrictions) |
| AAV2 virus-like particle, 3.02 Å (EMD-20610), with its fitted model (PDB 6U0V) | M. Agbandje-McKenna and A. Bennett (deposited 2019), via EMDB and the PDB | Public domain (EMDB: free of all copyright restrictions) |
