| 11. |
- Ekeberg, Tomas, 1983-, et al.
(författare)
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Three-dimensional structure determination with an X-ray laser
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Three-dimensional structure determination of a non-crystalline virus has been achieved from a set of randomly oriented continuous diffraction patterns captured with an X-ray laser. Intense, ultra-short X-ray pulses intercepted a beam of single mimivirus particles, producing single particle X-ray diffraction patterns that are assembled into a three-dimensional amplitude distribution based on statistical consistency. Phases are directly retrieved from the assembled Fourier distribution to synthesize a three-dimensional image. The resulting electron density reveals a pseudo-icosahedral asymmetric virion structure with a compartmentalized interior, within which the DNA genome occupies only about a fifth of the volume enclosed by the capsid. Additional electron microscopy data indicate the genome has a chromatin-like fiber structure that has not previously been observed in a virus.
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| 12. |
- Johansson, Linda C, 1983, et al.
(författare)
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Lipidic phase membrane protein serial femtosecond crystallography.
- 2012
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Ingår i: Nature methods. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 1548-7105 .- 1548-7091. ; 9:3, s. 263-265
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- X-ray free electron laser (X-FEL)-based serial femtosecond crystallography is an emerging method with potential to rapidly advance the challenging field of membrane protein structural biology. Here we recorded interpretable diffraction data from micrometer-sized lipidic sponge phase crystals of the Blastochloris viridis photosynthetic reaction center delivered into an X-FEL beam using a sponge phase micro-jet.
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| 13. |
- Konold, Patrick E., et al.
(författare)
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3D-printed sheet jet for stable megahertz liquid sample delivery at X-ray free-electron lasers
- 2023
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Ingår i: IUCrJ. - : International Union Of Crystallography. - 2052-2525. ; 10, s. 662-670
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) can probe chemical and biological reactions as they unfold with unprecedented spatial and temporal resolution. A principal challenge in this pursuit involves the delivery of samples to the X-ray interaction point in such a way that produces data of the highest possible quality and with maximal efficiency. This is hampered by intrinsic constraints posed by the light source and operation within a beamline environment. For liquid samples, the solution typically involves some form of high-speed liquid jet, capable of keeping up with the rate of X-ray pulses. However, conventional jets are not ideal because of radiation-induced explosions of the jet, as well as their cylindrical geometry combined with the X-ray pointing instability of many beamlines which causes the interaction volume to differ for every pulse. This complicates data analysis and contributes to measurement errors. An alternative geometry is a liquid sheet jet which, with its constant thickness over large areas, eliminates the problems related to X-ray pointing. Since liquid sheets can be made very thin, the radiation-induced explosion is reduced, boosting their stability. These are especially attractive for experiments which benefit from small interaction volumes such as fluctuation X-ray scattering and several types of spectroscopy. Although their use has increased for soft X-ray applications in recent years, there has not yet been wide-scale adoption at XFELs. Here, gas-accelerated liquid sheet jet sample injection is demonstrated at the European XFEL SPB/SFX nano focus beamline. Its performance relative to a conventional liquid jet is evaluated and superior performance across several key factors has been found. This includes a thickness profile ranging from hundreds of nanometres to 60 nm, a fourfold increase in background stability and favorable radiation-induced explosion dynamics at high repetition rates up to 1.13 MHz. Its minute thickness also suggests that ultrafast single-particle solution scattering is a possibility.
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| 14. |
- Morgan, Andrew J., et al.
(författare)
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Ab initio phasing of the diffraction of crystals with translational disorder
- 2019
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Ingår i: Acta Crystallographica Section A. - : INT UNION CRYSTALLOGRAPHY. - 2053-2733. ; 75, s. 25-40
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- To date X-ray protein crystallography is the most successful technique available for the determination of high-resolution 3D structures of biological molecules and their complexes. In X-ray protein crystallography the structure of a protein is refined against the set of observed Bragg reflections from a protein crystal. The resolution of the refined protein structure is limited by the highest angle at which Bragg reflections can be observed. In addition, the Bragg reflections alone are typically insufficient (by a factor of two) to determine the structure ab initio, and so prior information is required. Crystals formed from an imperfect packing of the protein molecules may also exhibit continuous diffraction between and beyond these Bragg reflections. When this is due to random displacements of the molecules from each crystal lattice site, the continuous diffraction provides the necessary information to determine the protein structure without prior knowledge, to a resolution that is not limited by the angular extent of the observed Bragg reflections but instead by that of the diffraction as a whole. This article presents an iterative projection algorithm that simultaneously uses the continuous diffraction as well as the Bragg reflections for the determination of protein structures. The viability of this method is demonstrated on simulated crystal diffraction.
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| 15. |
- Sala, S., et al.
(författare)
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Ptychographic imaging for the characterization of X-ray free-electron laser beams
- 2017
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Ingår i: X-RAY MICROSCOPY CONFERENCE 2016 (XRM 2016). - : IOP Publishing.
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Konferensbidrag (refereegranskat)abstract
- We present some preliminary results from a study aimed at the characterization of the wavefront of X-ray free electron laser (XFEL) beams in the same operation conditions as for single particle imaging (or flash X-ray imaging) experiments. The varying illumination produced by wavefront fluctuations between several pulses leads to a partially coherent average beam which can be decomposed into several coherent modes using ptychographic reconstruction algorithms. Such a decomposition can give insight into pulse-to-pulse variations of the wavefront. We discuss data collected at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) and FERMI.
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| 16. |
- Sobolev, Egor, et al.
(författare)
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Megahertz single-particle imaging at the European XFEL
- 2020
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Ingår i: Communications Physics. - : Springer Science and Business Media LLC. - 2399-3650. ; 3:1
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- The emergence of high repetition-rate X-ray free-electron lasers (XFELs) powered by superconducting accelerator technology enables the measurement of significantly more experimental data per day than was previously possible. The European XFEL is expected to provide 27,000 pulses per second, over two orders of magnitude more than any other XFEL. The increased pulse rate is a key enabling factor for single-particle X-ray diffractive imaging, which relies on averaging the weak diffraction signal from single biological particles. Taking full advantage of this new capability requires that all experimental steps, from sample preparation and delivery to the acquisition of diffraction patterns, are compatible with the increased pulse repetition rate. Here, we show that single-particle imaging can be performed using X-ray pulses at megahertz repetition rates. The results obtained pave the way towards exploiting high repetition-rate X-ray free-electron lasers for single-particle imaging at their full repetition rate.
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| 17. |
- Wollter, August, 1994-, et al.
(författare)
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Coherent X-ray Diffraction Imaging of Single Particles : Background Impact on 3D Reconstruction
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Annan publikation (övrigt vetenskapligt/konstnärligt)abstract
- Coherent diffractive imaging with X-ray free-electron lasers could enable structural studies of macromolecules at room temperature. This type of experiment could provide a means to study structural dynamics on the femtosecond time scale. However, the diffraction from a single protein is weak compared to the incoherent scattering from background sources, which negatively affects the reconstruction analysis. In this work, we evaluated the effects of the presence of background on the analysis pipeline. Background measurements from the European X-ray free-electron laser were combined with simulated diffraction patterns, and treated by a standard reconstruction procedure including orientation recovery with the expand, maximize and compress algorithm and 3D phase retrieval. Background scattering did have an adverse effect on the estimated resolution of the reconstructed density maps. Still, the reconstructions generally worked when the signal-to-background ratio was 0.6 or better, at the momentum transfer shell of the highest reconstructed resolution. The results also suggest that the signal-to-background requirement increases at higher resolution. This study gives an indication of what is possible at current setups at X-ray free-electron lasers, with regards to expected background strength and establishes a target for experimental optimization of the background.
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| 18. |
- Wollter, August, et al.
(författare)
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Enhanced EMC-Advantages of partially known orientations in x-ray single particle imaging
- 2024
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Ingår i: Journal of Chemical Physics. - : American Institute of Physics (AIP). - 0021-9606 .- 1089-7690. ; 160:11
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- Single particle imaging of proteins in the gas phase with x-ray free-electron lasers holds great potential to study fast protein dynamics, but is currently limited by weak and noisy data. A further challenge is to discover the proteins' orientation as each protein is randomly oriented when exposed to x-rays. Algorithms such as the expand, maximize, and compress (EMC) exist that can solve the orientation problem and reconstruct the three-dimensional diffraction intensity space, given sufficient measurements. If information about orientation were known, for example, by using an electric field to orient the particles, the reconstruction would benefit and potentially reach better results. We used simulated diffraction experiments to test how the reconstructions from EMC improve with particles' orientation to a preferred axis. Our reconstructions converged to correct maps of the three-dimensional diffraction space with fewer measurements if biased orientation information was considered. Even for a moderate bias, there was still significant improvement. Biased orientations also substantially improved the results in the case of missing central information, in particular in the case of small datasets. The effects were even more significant when adding a background with 50% the strength of the averaged diffraction signal photons to the diffraction patterns, sometimes reducing the data requirement for convergence by a factor of 10. This demonstrates the usefulness of having biased orientation information in single particle imaging experiments, even for a weaker bias than what was previously known. This could be a key component in overcoming the problems with background noise that currently plague these experiments.
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| 19. |
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| 20. |
- Zhuang, Yulong, et al.
(författare)
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Unsupervised learning approaches to characterizing heterogeneous samples using X-ray single-particle imaging
- 2022
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Ingår i: IUCrJ. - : International Union of Crystallography (IUCr). - 2052-2525. ; 9, s. 204-214
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- One of the outstanding analytical problems in X-ray single-particle imaging (SPI) is the classification of structural heterogeneity, which is especially difficult given the low signal-to-noise ratios of individual patterns and the fact that even identical objects can yield patterns that vary greatly when orientation is taken into consideration. Proposed here are two methods which explicitly account for this orientation-induced variation and can robustly determine the structural landscape of a sample ensemble. The first, termed common-line principal component analysis (PCA), provides a rough classification which is essentially parameter free and can be run automatically on any SPI dataset. The second method, utilizing variation auto-encoders (VAEs), can generate 3D structures of the objects at any point in the structural landscape. Both these methods are implemented in combination with the noise-tolerant expand-maximizecompress (EMC) algorithm and its utility is demonstrated by applying it to an experimental dataset from gold nanoparticles with only a few thousand photons per pattern. Both discrete structural classes and continuous deformations are recovered. These developments diverge from previous approaches of extracting reproducible subsets of patterns from a dataset and open up the possibility of moving beyond the study of homogeneous sample sets to addressing open questions on topics such as nanocrystal growth and dynamics, as well as phase transitions which have not been externally triggered.
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