New tool: localres

I just finished putting together a command-line tool to plot a histogram of local resolution values from a local resolution 3D map and a 3D mask (relion_locres.mrc and mask.mrc files from RELION, respectively). This is a useful visualization to complement a color-coded local resolution scale mapped onto the 3D reconstruction (or visualized across slices of said reconstruction) as usually shown in publications describing a cryo-EM structure. An example is displayed in Figure S3C of my recent preprint.

I got the idea from a Twitter conversation, reused the suggested code and wrapped it in a command-line tool that is documented and easy to install. The (very simple) code is available here. I also made it citeable with doi:10.5281/zenodo.3575230 .

This was a good toy project to learn some basics of Python, especially to learn how to use the click library to parse command-line arguments, how to package a Python program and how to distribute it. I was surprised that anyone can upload anything to the Python Package Index without any form of review (in the R world, a review team checks every package submitted to the CRAN repository).