3D diffractive imaging of nanoparticle ensembles using an x-ray laser

• DOI: 10.1364/optica.410851
• Publication Date: 2020-11-20T17:01:37Z
• Authors: Kartik Ayyer; P. Lourdu Xavier; Johan Bielecki; Zhou Shen; Benedikt J. Daurer; Amit K. Samanta; Salah Awel; Richard Bean; Anton Barty; Martin Bergemann; Tomas Ekeberg; Armando D. Estillore; Hans Fangohr; Klaus Giewekemeyer; Mark S. Hunter; Mikhail Karnevskiy; Richard A. Kirian; Henry Kirkwood; Yoonhee Kim; Jayanath Koliyadu; Holger Lange; Romain Letrun; Jannik Lübke; Thomas Michelat; Andrew J. Morgan; Nils Roth; Tokushi Sato; Marcin Sikorski; Florian Schulz; John C. H. Spence; Patrik Vagovic; Tamme Wollweber; Lena Worbs; Oleksandr Yefanov; Yulong Zhuang; Filipe R. N. C. Maia; Daniel A. Horke; Jochen Küpper; N. Duane Loh; Adrian P. Mancuso; Henry N. Chapman
• Keywords: 0301 basic medicine; 550; x-ray free electron lasers; Spectroscopy of Cold Molecules; sub-nanometer biomolecular imaging; 500; Materialkemi; Condensed Matter Physics; 530; 620; 03 medical and health sciences; Materials Chemistry; Den kondenserade materiens fysik; info:eu-repo/classification/ddc/620; Uncategorized

Single particle imaging at x-ray free electron lasers (XFELs) has the potential to determine the structure and dynamics of single biomolecules at room temperature. Two major hurdles have prevented this potential from being reached, namely, the collection of sufficient high-quality diffraction patterns and robust computational purification to overcome structural heterogeneity. We report the breaking of both of these barriers using gold nanoparticle test samples, recording around 10 million diffraction patterns at the European XFEL and structurally and orientationally sorting the patterns to obtain better than 3-nm-resolution 3D reconstructions for each of four samples. With these new developments, integrating advancements in x-ray sources, fast-framing detectors, efficient sample delivery, and data analysis algorithms, we illuminate the path towards sub-nanometer biomolecular imaging. The methods developed here can also be extended to characterize ensembles that are inherently diverse to obtain their full structural landscape.