Femtosecond Three-Dimensional Imaging of Single-Protein with Hard X-ray Laser

Single-particle diffractive imaging is one of the key foundational goals behind the establishment of X-ray Free-Electron Laser (XFEL) facilities. Outrunning radiation damage, extremely intense femtosecond XFEL pulses open up the possibility of imaging uncrystallized aperiodic single-particles frozen in time at room-temperature at the timescales of atomic and electronic motions and thus enabling the capturing of complete energy landscape of molecules both at ground and excited states with sufficiently large data. Despite the current sample-delivery and background scattering challenges, there has been a steady progress in XFEL-single-particle imaging (XFEL-SPI), especially with large viruses. As a significant-step towards XFEL imaging of the structure and dynamics of uncrystallized single-macromolecules, in this presentation, we report the demonstration of three-dimensional diffractive imaging of an uncrystallized single-protein for the first time using hard-x-ray laser pulses at the European X-ray Free-Electron Laser (EuXFEL)—a highly-significant and much-awaited milestone in biological XFEL-SPI. This opens up several new exciting avenues including, but not limited to, ultrafast time-resolved imaging of dynamics in uncrystallized single-proteins.