Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) is an imaging technique that allows to reconstruct the three-dimensional volume of whole biological samples - such as cells and tissues - in situ, in near-native conditions and within their biological context.
With the development of direct electron detectors and increased computing power, in recent years cryo-ET has rapidly become a powerful and ubiquitous tool in the arsenals of structural biologists, sometimes capable of reaching sub-nanometer resolution.
Due to the yet immature software ecosystem and the complexity of the workflows, working with cryo-ET data is still error-prone and requires constant human supervision, especially when it comes to subtomogram averaging pipelines attempting to reach high resolution reconstructions.
This thesis presents the development of blik, a tool aimed at simplifying working with cryo-ET data by providing interactive visualisation, analysis and annotation that are both powerful and customizable, with a focus on the analysis of superstructural systems such as filaments and membranes.
​ Using blik and other tools, we investigate the cell wall composition and septation mechanism in the radiation resistant bacterium Deinococcus radiodurans, and study the structure and role of FtsZ, a tubulin homologue which plays a key role in cell division.
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