A comprehensive simulation framework for imaging single particles and biomolecules at the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser

Sci Rep. 2016 Apr 25:6:24791. doi: 10.1038/srep24791.

Abstract

The advent of newer, brighter, and more coherent X-ray sources, such as X-ray Free-Electron Lasers (XFELs), represents a tremendous growth in the potential to apply coherent X-rays to determine the structure of materials from the micron-scale down to the Angstrom-scale. There is a significant need for a multi-physics simulation framework to perform source-to-detector simulations for a single particle imaging experiment, including (i) the multidimensional simulation of the X-ray source; (ii) simulation of the wave-optics propagation of the coherent XFEL beams; (iii) atomistic modelling of photon-material interactions; (iv) simulation of the time-dependent diffraction process, including incoherent scattering; (v) assembling noisy and incomplete diffraction intensities into a three-dimensional data set using the Expansion-Maximisation-Compression (EMC) algorithm and (vi) phase retrieval to obtain structural information. We demonstrate the framework by simulating a single-particle experiment for a nitrogenase iron protein using parameters of the SPB/SFX instrument of the European XFEL. This exercise demonstrably yields interpretable consequences for structure determination that are crucial yet currently unavailable for experiment design.

MeSH terms

  • Computer Simulation*
  • Crystallography, X-Ray / instrumentation*
  • Crystallography, X-Ray / methods
  • Electrons
  • Imaging, Three-Dimensional
  • Lasers*
  • Models, Theoretical*
  • Oxidoreductases / chemistry*
  • Photons
  • Protein Conformation
  • X-Ray Diffraction

Substances

  • Oxidoreductases
  • nitrogenase reductase