A minimal view of single-particle imaging with X-ray lasers

Abstract

The ability to serially interrogate single biomolecules with femtosecond X-ray pulses from free-electron lasers has ushered in the possibility of determining the three-dimensional structure of biomolecules without crystallization. However, the complexity of imaging a sample's structure from very many of its noisy and incomplete diffraction data can be daunting. In this review,we introduce a simple analogue of this imaging workflow, use it to describe a structure reconstruction algorithm based on the expectation maximization principle, and consider the effects of extraneous noise. Such a minimal model can aid experiment and algorithm design in future studies. © 2014 The Author(s) Published by the Royal Society. All rights reserved.