Reconstructing Three-dimensional Helical Structure With an X-Ray Free Electron Laser

Abstract

Recovery of three-dimensional structure from single particle X-ray scattering of completely randomly oriented diffraction patterns as predicted few decades back has been real due to the advent of the new emerging X-ray Free Electron Laser (XFEL) technology. As the worlds first XFEL is in operation starting from June 2009 at SLAC National Lab at Stanford, the very first few experiments being conducted on larger objects such as viruses. Many of the important structures of nature such as helical viruses or deoxyribonucleic acids (DNA) consist of helical repetition of biological subunits. Hence development of method for reconstructing helical structure from collected XFEL data has been a top priority research. In this work we have developed a method for solving helical structure such as TMV (tobacco mosaic virus) from a set of randomly oriented simulated diffraction patterns exploiting symmetry and Fourier space constraint of the diffraction volume.