Research Seminar in Mathematics - Random Tomography in Structural Biology

Speaker

Sim Sheng Long Bertrand.  National University of Singapore.

Abstact

Biologists are concerned with the molecular structure of biological macromolecules, especially amino and nucleic acids. This subject is of great interest, as research has shown that a molecule's function is primarily determined by its structure.

Current technology allows imaging of the molecule at high resolutions. By taking many projections of the molecule, the 3-dimensional object can be reconstructed using tomography techniques. While various reconstruction methods exist in the literature. many of these methods assume that the  projection angles are known. In this seminar, we discuss some approaches to such reconstruction problem where the angles are random and unobservable.