IT@JH High-Performance Computing Assists Hopkins Researchers with Detecting Motor Impairment – And More – Using High-Res Imaging
September 29, 2025 | By Jasmyne Ferber, IT@JH
INVESTIGATOR
- Name: Edward Twomey, MA, MPhil, Ph.D.
- Affiliation: Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry, School of Medicine
- Services Used: DISCOVERY (HPC)
USE CASE
A research team at Johns Hopkins University is using IT@JH’s high-performance computing (HPC) resources to analyze high-resolution molecular imagery to study the cause of cerebellar ataxia, a condition that impairs motor control.
Led by Edward Twomey, assistant professor of Biophysics and Biophysical Chemistry at the School of Medicine, Structural Biology lead for the new Life Sciences Building set to open in 2028, and the co-director of the Beckman Center for CryoEM, the team is using cryo-electron microscopy—or CryoEM—to check for disease-related mutations in the brain receptors that cause motor dysfunction.
“You can think of CryoEM as a type of molecular photography,” Twomey explained. “We are purifying molecules and imaging them with electrons, and this gives us very high-resolution images of these receptors.”
Brain receptors are the protein molecules present on the surface of neurons that help to transfer signals from outside the brain to the inside. These receptors are necessary for neurons to connect with each other and enable basic functions like balance and muscle coordination.
“When there’s a dysfunction in these receptors, disease-related mutations are present,” Twomey said.
To process these high-resolution images, Twomey’s team logs onto the IT@JH DISCOVERY HPC resource and runs CryoSparc—a widely used structural biology software application installed on the cluster—to search for individual receptors within the images, combine them to create a 3D molecular model, and “tell exactly how a mutation is dysregulating a receptor.”
DISCOVERY HPC allows thousands of compute jobs to run on graphics processing units (GPUs) and provides adequate space for hot data storage, enabling Twomey’s team to better handle their data—which can span from 20 to 30 terabytes for each of the 10 projects within their lab. This access to increased throughput makes it possible for his team to reproduce experiments and permit multiple investigators to analyze the same datasets from different perspectives, something Twomey said is fundamental, but normally not feasible.
“For CryoEM, there is a huge data demand that’s really quite impossible and challenging for individual labs to manage on their own – from both a data point of view and in terms of hardware,” Twomey said.
Through IT@JH, Twomey’s team has access to hardware that is exponentially greater than what is available in their lab, significantly “expediting [their] research processing pipeline.”
“We started this project in October [2024],” he said. “We could not have moved this quickly if we didn’t have [IT@JH] Research IT.”
Tyler Creamer, an IT@JH Research IT facilitator, stated partnering with Twomey’s team was key to implementing this type of hardware and software needed by the CryoEM community.
“Ed’s team is doing great work with big data which is an interesting type of science and problem for researchers,” Creamer said. “Being able to create a shared resource with enough computing capacity so these large datasets don’t feel so daunting, as well as making complex working environments accessible to the JH research community has been a goal of Research IT.”
According to Twomey, to use an infrastructure like this, typically investigators would need to have a specialized lab equipped with several GPUs and the expertise to run them.
“We are helping to lower the bar so that these types of resources are accessible through DISCOVERY HPC,” Twomey said. “This is going to open up the possibility for labs that aren’t specialized in CryoEM, or don’t have the infrastructure, to add this research tool to their labs. I’m very excited about that.”
If you are interested in using IT@JH’s Research IT services or would like more information, please fill out our Research IT Intake Form and a member of the team will contact you by email in one to three business days.