Cianfrocco, Michael ALeschziner, Andres E2015-06-022015Cianfrocco, Michael A., and Andres E Leschziner. 2015. “Low cost, high performance processing of single particle cryo-electron microscopy data in the cloud.” eLife 4 (1): e06664. doi:10.7554/eLife.06664. http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06664.2050-084Xhttp://nrs.harvard.edu/urn-3:HUL.InstRepos:16120956The advent of a new generation of electron microscopes and direct electron detectors has realized the potential of single particle cryo-electron microscopy (cryo-EM) as a technique to generate high-resolution structures. Calculating these structures requires high performance computing clusters, a resource that may be limiting to many likely cryo-EM users. To address this limitation and facilitate the spread of cryo-EM, we developed a publicly available ‘off-the-shelf’ computing environment on Amazon's elastic cloud computing infrastructure. This environment provides users with single particle cryo-EM software packages and the ability to create computing clusters with 16–480+ CPUs. We tested our computing environment using a publicly available 80S yeast ribosome dataset and estimate that laboratories could determine high-resolution cryo-EM structures for $50 to $1500 per structure within a timeframe comparable to local clusters. Our analysis shows that Amazon's cloud computing environment may offer a viable computing environment for cryo-EM. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.7554/eLife.06664.001en-UScryo-EMcloud computingimage analysissingle-particle analysisAmazon EC2Journal Article2015-06-0210.7554/eLife.06664