title: 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.
authors.affiliation: Center for Bioimaging Sciences and Department of Biological Sciences, National University of Singapore, 14 Science Drive 4, Singapore 117411 PULSE Institute, SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, Menlo Park, CA 94025, USA duaneloh@slac.stanford.edu.
authors.forename: N Duane
authors.initials: ND
authors.lastname: Loh
mesh_terms: D000465:Algorithms; D004583:Electrons; D007834:Lasers; D008962:Models, Theoretical; D008968:Molecular Conformation; D013997:Time Factors; D014961:X-Ray Diffraction / Q000379:methods*
keywords: X-ray free-electron laser; bioimaging; coherent diffraction; single particle imaging