Cryo-EM combined with image deconvolution to determine ZIF-8 crystal structure

Metal–organic frameworks(MOFs) are crystalline porous materials with tunable properties, exhibiting great potential in gas adsorption, separation and catalysis.[1,2]It is challenging to visualize MOFs with transmission electron microscopy(TEM) due to their inherent instability under electron beam irradiation. Here, we employ cryo-electron microscopy(cryoEM) to capture images of MOF ZIF-8, revealing inverted-space structural information at a resolution of up to about 1.7A and enhancing its critical electron dose to around 20 e^(-)/A^(2). In addition, it is confirmed by electron-beam irradiation experiments that the high voltage could effectively mitigate the radiolysis, and the structure of ZIF-8 is more stable along the [100] direction under electron beam irradiation. Meanwhile, since the high-resolution electron microscope images are modulated by contrast transfer function(CTF) and it is difficult to determine the positions corresponding to the atomic columns directly from the images. We employ image deconvolution to eliminate the impact of CTF and obtain the structural images of ZIF-8. As a result, the heavy atom Zn and the organic imidazole ring within the organic framework can be distinguished from structural images.

Blind image deconvolution for single motion-blurred image

Motion blur due to camera shake during exposure is one of the most common reasons of image degradation, which usually reduces the quality of photographs seriously. Based on the statistical properties of the natural image＇s gradient and the blur kernel, a blind deconvolution algorithm is proposed to restore the motion-blurred image caused by camera shake, adopting the variational Bayesian estimation theory. In addition, the ring effect is one problem that is not avoided in the process of image deconvolution, and usually makes the visual effect of the restored image badly. So a dering method is put forward based on the sub-region detection and fuzzy filter. Tested on the real blurred photographs, the experimental results show that the proposed algorithm of blind image deconvolution can remove the camera-shake motion blur from the degraded image effectively, and can eliminate the ring effect better, while preserve the edges and details of the image well.

Reflection full waveform inversion

Because of the combination of optimization algorithms and full wave equations, full-waveform inversion(FWI) has become the frontier of the study of seismic exploration and is gradually becoming one of the essential tools for obtaining the Earth interior information. However, the application of conventional FWI to pure reflection data in the absence of a highly accurate starting velocity model is difficult. Compared to other types of seismic waves, reflections carry the information of the deep part of the subsurface. Reflection FWI, therefore, is able to improve the accuracy of imaging the Earth interior further. Here, we demonstrate a means of achieving this successfully by interleaving least-squares RTM with a version of reflection FWI in which the tomographic gradient that is required to update the background macro-model is separated from the reflectivity gradient using the Born approximation during forward modeling. This provides a good update to the macro-model. This approach is then followed by conventional FWI to obtain a final high-fidelity high-resolution result from a poor starting model using only reflection data.Further analysis reveals the high-resolution result is achieved due to a deconvolution imaging condition implicitly used by FWI.