Steven J. Ludtke

Professor of Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Co-director of the NCMI (National Center for Macromolecular Imaging)  Co-director of the CIBR Center  (Computational and Integrative Biomedical Research) at Baylor College of Medicine (not affiliated with Baylor University) Grad. School: Rice University, PhD in Physics Undergrad: Caltech Check my curriculum vitae for details.

My group focuses on electron cryomicroscopy (cryo-EM), a technique permitting 3-D visualization and reconstruction of biological molecules and other structures at resolutions as high as ~3.5 A (0.35 nm). My group develops the popular EMAN2 scientific image processing software suite. While it was initially developed for single particle analysis, it has found a range of other uses as well. My group also develops the EMEN2 electronic lab notebook and object oriented database system, in use by ~1000 users worldwide. We are also involved in a wide range of structural biology projects, including membrane channel proteins, chaperonins, HDL/LDL, ribosomes, apoptosis complexes, virus-antibody complexes, and many others.

Publications:

Open-source Software Development

Current Projects:

EMAN2	Complete scientific image processing software suite with complete graphical interface and Python bindings. Focused mainly on cryo-EM, but now also seeing use in other disciplines. Integrated workflows exist for: Single particle reconstruction Single particle tomography Random conical tilt Tilt validation 2-D population dynamics
EMAN	The original version of my group's single particle reconstruction software package.
EMEN2	A web-based Object Oriented Database and Electronic Lab notebook solution. The NCMI instance of this database has ~20 TB of data and over 800 users, but it is also used in other labs. In addition to serving as an electronic lab notebook, it is also well suited to be used as a general purpose object oriented database and content management system for small to medium scale installations.

Previously developed software, no longer actively maintained:

emtool A xforms-based program for interactve image processing of electron micrographs. Useful, but most of its functionality has been subsumed by EMAN.

empgm Nongraphical electron microscopy image format converter. (also see proc2d in EMAN)

tld2mrc Converts Zeiss .tld files to MRC format.

NXplotNd A multidimensional plotting and data analysis program (NeXTStep ONLY)

NXPlot3d 3.1 An easy to use 3d plotting program (data and functions) (NeXTStep ONLY)

MolViewer 0.92 A molecule viewing and manipulation program (NeXTStep ONLY)

Houston Interactive Restaurant Database (discontinued) A database of the restaurants in the Houston area with real time searching and user provided data with an interactive Java client with map.