MRC is a file format that has become an industry standard in
cryo-electron microscopy
Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a cryomicroscopy technique applied on samples cooled to cryogenic temperatures. For biological specimens, the structure is preserved by embedding in an environment of vitreous ice. An aqueous sample s ...
(cryoEM) and
electron tomography Electron tomography (ET) is a tomography technique for obtaining detailed 3D structures of sub-cellular, macro-molecular, or materials specimens. Electron tomography is an extension of traditional transmission electron microscopy and uses a trans ...
(ET), where the result of the technique is a three-dimensional grid of
voxel
In 3D computer graphics, a voxel represents a value on a regular grid in three-dimensional space. As with pixels in a 2D bitmap, voxels themselves do not typically have their position (i.e. coordinates) explicitly encoded with their values. Ins ...
s each with a value corresponding to
electron density
In quantum chemistry, electron density or electronic density is the measure of the probability of an electron being present at an infinitesimal element of space surrounding any given point. It is a scalar quantity depending upon three spatial va ...
or
electric potential
The electric potential (also called the ''electric field potential'', potential drop, the electrostatic potential) is defined as the amount of work energy needed to move a unit of electric charge from a reference point to the specific point in ...
. It was developed by the MRC (
Medical Research Council, UK)
Laboratory of Molecular Biology
The Medical Research Council (MRC) Laboratory of Molecular Biology (LMB) is a research institute in Cambridge, England, involved in the revolution in molecular biology which occurred in the 1950–60s. Since then it has remained a major medical r ...
.
In 2014, the format was standardised.
The format specification is available on th
CCP-EM website
The MRC format is supported by many of the software packages listed in
b:Software Tools For Molecular Microscopy.
See also
*
CCP4 (file format)
The CCP4 file format is file generated by the Collaborative Computational Project Number 4 in 1979. The file format for electron density has become industry standard in X-ray crystallography and Cryo-electron microscopy where the result of the ...
References
External links
MRC specification
Computational chemistry
Structural biology
Computer file formats
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