Journal article
Imaging single cells in a beam of live cyanobacteria with an X-ray laser
Gijs van der Schot, Martin Svenda, Filipe RNC Maia, Max Hantke, Daniel P DePonte, M Marvin Seibert, Andrew Aquila, Joachim Schulz, Richard Kirian, Mengning Liang, Francesco Stellato, Bianca Iwan, Jakob Andreasson, Nicusor Timneanu, Daniel Westphal, F Nunes Almeida, Dusko Odic, Dirk Hasse, Gunilla H Carlsson, Daniel SD Larsson Show all
NATURE COMMUNICATIONS | NATURE PUBLISHING GROUP | Published : 2015
DOI: 10.1038/ncomms6704
Abstract
There exists a conspicuous gap of knowledge about the organization of life at mesoscopic levels. Ultra-fast coherent diffractive imaging with X-ray free-electron lasers can probe structures at the relevant length scales and may reach sub-nanometer resolution on micron-sized living cells. Here we show that we can introduce a beam of aerosolised cyanobacteria into the focus of the Linac Coherent Light Source and record diffraction patterns from individual living cells at very low noise levels and at high hit ratios. We obtain two-dimensional projection images directly from the diffraction patterns, and present the results as synthetic X-ray Nomarski images calculated from the complex-valued re..
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Funding Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the Swedish Research Council, the Knut and Alice Wallenberg Foundation, the European Research Council, the Rontgen-Angstrom Cluster and Stiftelsen Olle Engkvist Byggmastare. Portions of this research were carried out at the Linac Coherent Light Source, a national user facility operated by Stanford University on behalf of the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Basic Energy Sciences. We are grateful to the scientific and technical staff of the LCLS for support. We are indebted to the CAMP collaboration for giving us access to their experimental set-up and for supporting the experiment at the LCLS. We also thank the Max Planck Society for funding the development and operation of the CAMP instrument, which benefited many users at the LCLS.