Single mimivirus particles intercepted and imaged with an X-ray laser

By M. Seibert, T. Ekeberg, F. Maia, M. Svenda, J. Andreasson, Olof Jönsson, Duško Odić, B. Iwan, A. Rocker, D. Westphal and 79 more. Nature, 2011

839 citations recorded by the source corpus.

X-ray lasers offer new capabilities in understanding the structure of biological systems, complex materials and matter under extreme conditions. Very short and extremely bright, coherent X-ray pulses can be used to outrun key damage processes and obtain a single diffraction pattern from a large macromolecule, a virus or a cell before the sample explodes and turns into plasma. The continuous diffraction pattern of non-crystalline objects permits oversampling and direct phase retrieval. Here we show that high-quality diffraction data can be obtained with a single X-ray pulse from a non-crystalline biological sample, a single mimivirus particle, which was injected into the pulsed beam of a hard-X-ray free-electron laser, the Linac Coherent Light Source. Calculations indicate that the energy deposited into the virus by the pulse heated the particle to over 100,000 K after the pulse had left the sample. The reconstructed exit wavefront (image) yielded 32-nm full-period resolution in a single exposure and showed no measurable damage. The reconstruction indicates inhomogeneous arrangement of dense material inside the virion. We expect that significantly higher resolutions will be achieved in such experiments with shorter and brighter photon pulses focused to a smaller area. The resolution in such experiments can be further extended for samples available in multiple identical copies.

Subfields: Materials Chemistry, Nuclear and High Energy Physics, Radiation

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/7f621f0f929aee29732bf8eba6bfe1ad66713d85

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In Materials Chemistry

In Nuclear and High Energy Physics

Henry N. Chapman

In Radiation

Citations in the corpus

Coherent X-Ray Diffraction Imaging (2012, methodology): “Presently, several X-ray and EUV FEL facilities are in operation, including the LCLS, Stanford, U.S.; the FLASH, DESY, Germany; and the SCSS, SPring-8, Japan [143]–[145].”
Cheetah: software for high-throughput reduction and analysis of serial femtosecond X-ray diffraction data (2014, background): “…conventional X-ray sources, enabling measurements from crystals at room temperature, crystals that are too small for easy study at synchrotron sources or where time resolution is desired to trace the path of biochemical reactions (Chapman et al., 2011; Seibert et al., 2011; Redecke et al., 2013).”
X-ray diffraction from isolated and strongly aligned gas-phase molecules with a free-electron laser (2013, neutral): “[10] M Marvin Seibert, Tomas Ekeberg, Filipe R N C Maia, Martin Svenda, Jakob Andreasson, Olof Jönsson, Duško Odić, Bianca Iwan, Andrea Rocker, Daniel Westphal, Max Hantke, Daniel P Deponte, Anton Barty, Joachim Schulz, Lars Gumprecht, Nicola Coppola, Andrew Aquila, Mengning Liang, Thomas A White, A”
Ultra-fast and ultra-intense x-ray sciences: first results from the Linac Coherent Light Source free-electron laser (2013, background): “, non-identical) biological objects [30, 31] and aerosols [32] as well as the rapidly developing field of nanocrystallography of biological samples [33].”
Roadmap of ultrafast x-ray atomic and molecular physics (2018, background): “The first proof-of-principle experiments for single-shot imaging of single nanometer-sized samples in the gas phase (figure 15) were targeted at determining cluster shapes and sizes [92], the morphologies of cluster assemblies [93], and imaging biological specimens [94].”