Sayre D
Department of Physics and Astronomy, Stony Brook University, Stony Brook, NY 11794-3800, USA.
Acta Crystallogr A. 2008 Jan;64(Pt 1):33-5. doi: 10.1107/S010876730705550X. Epub 2007 Dec 21.
Single-particle X-ray diffraction is an extension of X-ray crystallography which allows the specimen to be any small solid-state bounded object; in Shapiro et al. [Proc. Natl Acad. Sci. USA (2005), 102, 15343-15346] and Thibault et al. [Acta Cryst. (2006), A62, 248-261], the reader can find descriptions of a recent StonyBrook/Berkeley/Cornell two-dimensional imaging of a yeast cell by this technique. Our present work is aimed at extending the technique to the three-dimensional imaging of a cell. However, the usual method of doing that, namely rotating the specimen into many orientations in the X-ray beam, has not as yet given sufficiently good three-dimensional diffraction data to allow the work to go forward, the largest problem being the difficulty of preventing unwanted levels of change in the specimen through the extended exposure to a hostile environment of X-rays and, in some cases, high vacuum and/or extreme cold. The present paper discusses possible methods of dealing with this problem.
单粒子X射线衍射是X射线晶体学的一种扩展，它允许样本为任何小型固态有界物体；在夏皮罗等人的论文[《美国国家科学院院刊》(2005年)，第102卷，第15343 - 15346页]以及蒂博尔特等人的论文[《晶体学报》(2006年)，A62卷，第248 - 261页]中，读者可以找到关于最近利用该技术对酵母细胞进行二维成像的描述。我们目前的工作旨在将该技术扩展到细胞的三维成像。然而，通常的做法，即将样本在X射线束中旋转到许多不同方向，尚未得到足够好的三维衍射数据以使这项工作能够推进，最大的问题在于难以防止样本在长时间暴露于充满X射线的恶劣环境以及在某些情况下的高真空和/或极冷环境中发生不必要程度的变化。本文讨论了解决这个问题的可能方法。
