Methodology for determining the three-dimensional crystal structure of myosin Sl from electron microscopy of orthogonal thin sections

Detailed knowledge of the structure of myosin is essential for understanding the mechanism of muscle contraction. The discovery of conditions for crystallizing the head of myosin (Sl = subfragment 1) has led to systematic studies of the SI structure by x-ray crystallography and electron microscopy. We describe the method used to determine the structure of the myosin Sl molecule by electron microscopy (Fig. 3). This method involved independently reconstructing the three-dimensional density of several thin sections obtained from oriented crystals and then combining these reconstructions to produce a final, averaged density map of a single unit cell.