MRC is a file format that has become an industry standard in
cryo-electron microscopy
Cryogenic electron microscopy (cryo-EM) is a cryomicroscopy technique applied on samples cooled to cryogenic temperatures. For biological specimens, the structure is preserved by embedding in an environment of vitreous ice. An aqueous sample sol ...
(cryoEM) and
electron tomography (ET), where the result of the technique is a three-dimensional grid of
voxel
In 3D computer graphics, a voxel represents a value on a regular grid in three-dimensional space. As with pixels in a 2D bitmap, voxels themselves do not typically have their position (i.e. coordinates) explicitly encoded with their values. ...
s each with a value corresponding to
electron density
In quantum chemistry, electron density or electronic density is the measure of the probability of an electron being present at an infinitesimal element of space surrounding any given point. It is a scalar quantity depending upon three spatial ...
or
electric potential
The electric potential (also called the ''electric field potential'', potential drop, the electrostatic potential) is defined as the amount of work energy needed to move a unit of electric charge from a reference point to the specific point in ...
. It was developed by the MRC (
Medical Research Council, UK)
Laboratory of Molecular Biology.
In 2014, the format was standardised.
The format specification is available on th
CCP-EM website
The MRC format is supported by many of the software packages listed in
b:Software Tools For Molecular Microscopy.
See also
*
CCP4 (file format)
References
External links
MRC specification
Computational chemistry
Structural biology
Computer file formats
{{Biophysics-stub