PT - JOURNAL ARTICLE AU - Michael A. Cianfrocco AU - Andres E. Leschziner TI - Low cost, high performance processing of single particle cryo-electron microscopy data in the cloud AID - 10.1101/016451 DP - 2015 Jan 01 TA - bioRxiv PG - 016451 4099 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/03/13/016451.short 4100 - http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2015/03/13/016451.full AB - The advent of a new generation of electron microscopes and direct electron detectors has realized the potential of single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) as a technique to generate high-resolution structures. However, calculating these structures requires high performance computing clusters, a resource that may be limiting to many likely cryo-EM users. To address this limitation and facilitate the spread of cryo-EM, we developed a publicly available ‘off-the-shelf’ computing environment on Amazon’s elastic cloud computing infrastructure. This environment provides users with single particle cryo-EM software packages and the ability to create computing clusters that can range in size from 16 to 480+ CPUs. Importantly, these computing clusters are also cost-effective, as we illustrate here by determining a near-atomic resolution structure of the 80S yeast ribosome for $28.89 USD in ~10 hours.