The Telescience Portal for advanced tomography applications

Electron tomography is a powerful tool for deriving three-dimensional (3D) structural information about biological systems within the spatial scale spanning 1 nm(3) and 10 mum(3). With this technique, it is possible to derive detailed models of subcellular components such as organelles and synaptic complexes and to resolve the 3D distribution of their protein constituents in situ. While there continues to be progress towards the integration of high-performance computing technologies with traditional electron tomography processes, there is a significant need for more transparent integration with applications and to minimize the administrative overhead and complexity (resource administration, authentication, scheduling, data delivery) passed on to the noncomputer scientist end user. Here we present the "Telescience Portal" (https://gridport.npaci.edu/Telescience) as an example of a fully integrated, web-based solution for performing end-to-end electron tomography. More than just a collection of individual applications, the Portal provides a transparent workflow, where simple intuitive interfaces for grid-enabled parallel computation, resource scheduling, remote instrumentation, advanced image processing and visualization, access to distributed/federated databases, and network-enabled data management and archival are tightly coupled within a secure environment which promotes increased collaboration between researchers. This tightly integrated Telescience system is a test-bed application for using grid resources to accelerate the throughput of data acquisition and processing, increase access to scarce and/or expensive instrumentation, and improve the accuracy of derived data products. (C) 2003 Elsevier Science (USA). All rights reserved.