Twist and Scout: Analysis and Curation of Particles in Cryo-Electron Tomography Using TANGO

Abstract

Cryo-electron tomography (cryo-ET) enables the visualization of cellular structures in near-native environments, but its potential for spatial analysis has been underutilized due to a lack of versatile tools accommodating biological sample diversity. Available solutions often rely on case-specific or hypothesis-driven approaches, while holistic analyses remain challenging. In this work, we introduce TANGO (Twist-Aware Neighborhoods for Geometric Organization), a novel framework leveraging point cloud descriptors to analyze spatial arrangements of particles, such as macromolecular complexes, in cryo-ET. By encoding relative positions and orientations of particles as twist vectors, TANGO enables rotationally invariant feature extraction, including structured neighborhood occupancy, lattice topology, or angular deviations. Its modular design and user-friendly interface allow for customization of features, facilitating exploratory analyses of spatial patterns in diverse experimental datasets. With its open-source Python implementation, TANGO advances the ability to decode complex cellular architectures and their functional relationships, offering a valuable tool for the cryo-ET community.