Serial femtosecond crystallography

This method of data collection is referred to as serial, referencing a row of crystals streaming across the X-ray beam, one at a time.

While the idea of serial crystallography had been proposed earlier,[4] it was first demonstrated with XFELs by Chapman et al.[5] at the Linac Coherent Light Source (LCLS) in 2011.

This method has since been extended to solve unknown structures, perform time-resolved experiments, and later even brought back to synchrotron X-ray sources.

In comparison to conventional crystallography, where a single (relatively large) crystal is rotated in order to collect a 3D data set, some additional methods have to be developed to measure in the serial mode.

A summary of these methods along with their key relative features is given below: In order to recover a 3D structure from the individual diffraction patterns, they must be oriented, scaled and merged to generate a list of hkℓ intensities.