. Image analysis of electron micrographs of thin-sectioned myosin subfragment-1 (Sl) crystals has been used to determine the structure of the myosin head at ti25-A resolution . Previous work established that the unit cell of type I crystals of myosin Sl contains eight molecules arranged with orthorhombic space group symmetry P212,2, and provided preliminary information on the size and shape of the myosin head (Winkelmann, D. A., H. Mekeel, and I. Rayment . 1985. J. Mol. Biol. 181 :487-501) . We have applied a systematic method of data collection by electron microscopy to reconstruct the three-dimensional (3D) structure of the Sl crystal lattice. Electron micrographs of thin sections were recorded at angles of up to 50°by tilting the sections about the two orthogonal unit cell axes in sections cut perpendicular to the three major crystallographic axes. The data from six separate tilt series were merged to form a complete data set for 31) recon-HE primary role of the interaction of actin and myosin is the generation of force and motion . This occurs as a consequence of the cyclic interaction of the motor domain ofmyosin with actin filaments and is driven by myosin ATP hydrolysis. Muscle myosin is a large, asymmetric, multi-domain molecule composed of six polypeptides : two heavy chains ofmolecular mass 220,000 D and two pairs of light chains of molecular masses 17,000-23,000 D (Warrick and Spudich, 1987). The carboxy-terminal portion of the myosin heavy chains associate to form an a-helical coiled-coil rod . The amino-terminal portion of each heavy chainassociates withtwo different light chain to form anelongatedglobular domain ; this structure contains the sites for hydrolysisofATP and forbinding actin (Margossian and Lowey, 1973) . Myosin can be fragmented by limited proteolysis with papain, trypsin, and chymotrypsin into several structural and functional domains (Lowey et al., 1969;Weeds and Taylor, 1975) . Major fragments that retain enzymatic or assembly properties have been prepared by cleavage in the rod to form heavy meromyosin (HMM)' and light meromyosin (LMM)1. Abbreviations used in this paper: HMM, heavy meromyosin ; LMM, light meromyosin ; Sl, myosin subfragment-1 ; SF, structure factor ; 3D, threedimensional .© The Rockefeller University Press, 0021-9525/91/08/701/13 $2 .00 The Journal of Cell Biology, Volume 114, Number 4, August 1991701-713 struction. This approach has yielded an electron density map of the unit cell of the St crystals of sufficient detail to delineate the molecular envelope of the myosin head. Myosin Sl has a tadpole-shaped molecular envelope that is very similar in appearance to the pear-shaped myosin heads observed by electron microscopy of rotary-shadowed and negatively stained myosin. The molecule is divided into essentially three morphological domains: a large domain on one end of the molecule corresponding to -60 % of the total molecular volume, a smaller central domain of ti 30 % of the volume that is separatedfrom the larger domain by a cleft on one side of the m...