Physics Commons^™

Macromolecular Structure Determination At X-Ray Free Electron Lasers From Single-Particle Imaging To Time-Resolved X-Ray Crystallography, Ishwor Poudyal

Theses and Dissertations

X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) open the possibility of obtaining diffraction information from a single biological macromolecule. This is because XFELs can generate extremely intense X-ray pulses which are so short that diffraction data can be collected before the sample is destroyed. By collecting a sufficient number of single-particle diffraction patterns from many tilts of a molecule relative to the X-ray beam, the three-dimensional electron density can be reconstructed ab-initio. The resolution and therefore the information content of the data will ultimately depend largely on the number of patterns collected at the experiment. We estimate the number of diffraction patterns required …