Team reconstructs nanoscale virus features from correlations of scattered X-rays

As part of an international research team, Jeff Donatelli, Peter Zwart and Kanupriya Pande of the Center for Advanced Mathematics for Energy Research Applications (CAMERA) at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (Berkeley Lab) contributed key algorithms which helped achieve a goal first proposed more than 40 years ago – using angular correlations of X-ray snapshots from non-crystalline molecules to determine the 3D structure of important biological objects. This technique has the potential to allow scientists to shed light on biological structure and dynamics that were previously impossible to observe with traditional X-ray methods.