Multiple particle classes

[kevinyamauchi]

It would be nice to be able to annotate multiple classes of particles in a single session.

It isn't clear to me the best way to write this type of annotation to disk. Some options:

• Single star file with a column to annotate the class
• One star file per class
• Something else?

Any thoughts? cc @bbarad @alisterburt @kephale

[alisterburt]

Hey @kevinyamauchi - standard RELION way of doing this would be an extra column called 'rlnClassNumber' with integer class ids starting at 1

[bbarad]

For classes of the same species this is true, but given that with surforama you're typically grabbing multiple different species (ribosome vs atp synthase, not ribosome in class 1 vs class 2), it might be worthwhile to have multiple star output as an option. With that said, switching between the two is quite simple and most analysis software (not just relion) does have very simple tools for only grabbing the particles from class 1 or 2 for further analysis.

[kevinyamauchi]

Thanks @alisterburt and @bbarad ! It sounds like long term we should support both single and multi-file output.

Perhaps just to keep it simple, we start with a single file and then add multi-file as an option in a follow up.