Exposure groupings from multiple acquisitions

Import and Export
1

Hi CryoSPARC team,

Once more, thank you for all the additions to CryoSPARC in 4.4 :slight_smile:

Another feature request… :blush: …or I’m missing something simple… :sweat:

When feeding CryoSPARC .xml files during micrograph import, the result from Patch Motion Correction always has a single Exposure Group (easily fixed in Exposure Group Utilities). However, feeding a single Patch Motion Correction job multiple imports outputs multiple groups, based on import job. Beam tilt numbers are still there, but using the Exposure Groups Utility treats the multiple groups as one. This results in the optics groups being a bit messy (different grids, different rotation on the stage, not to mention variation in microscope alignment).

Would it be possible to add an option to keep beam tilt value groups unique between imports? I understand that this will explode the exposure group numbers for data acquired across multiple runs… particularly with EPU when it does 9x9 shift grids! But it can help with difficult data (at least a little).

Something like:

  • Patch CTF outputs big dataset with 4 Exposure Groups from 4 Imports (via 1 Patch Motion run).
  • Exposure Groups Utility sees 4 imported Exposure Groups, groups by tilt within each of those Exposure Groups.
  • Rather than blobbing everything and splitting into, e.g. 69 groups (7x7 plus 5 on each edge seems most common from EPU for us) it splits group 1 via tilts into e.g.: 69 groups, then group 2 via tilts into e.g. 9 groups, group 3 via tilts into e.g. 37 groups, then group 4 it leaves as 1 group (due to not acquiring with AFIS).

Although this could be considered somewhat moot now that the latest update to EPU (EPU 3.6, TEM 3.17.1) actually does put a useful AFIS ID in the filename (although I wish they would zeropad the single-digit IDs)…

It would also be nice to have an option “abandon exposures without beam tilt definition” as there always seems to be one solitary micrograph somehow missing its corresponding .xml file… :thinking:

Thanks, this ended up being longer than I thought, trying to explain…

2

Hi @rbs_sci,

We have noted your feature request, but in the meantime, there is an alternative workflow to get this to work as you would suggest.

  1. Import movies with associated .xml files. Alternatively, import the beam shift data separately for movies importede before v4.4.
  2. This will set the exposure groups for each dataset from 0 to N. Now you will have multiple datasets but all having exposure groups 0 to N.
  3. Now a cryosparc-tools job can be used to offset the exposure groups so they are unique across all of the datasets.

Would this generate your intended result?

Additionally, importing using the file name and regex token, you can offset the exposure groups for each each import by running exposure group utilities and changing the parameter start_exp_group_id.

Best,
Kye

1 Like
3

Hi @kstachowski,

Yes, I think the cryosparc-tools flow would work. I’ll have a play.

Thanks. :slight_smile: