X-ray Free Electron Lasers: A Revolution in Structural Biology

The timely volume describes recent discoveries and method developments that have revolutionized Structural Biology with the advent of X-ray Free Electron Lasers. It provides, for the first time, a comprehensive examination of this cutting-edge technology. It discusses of-the-moment topics such as growth and detection of nanocrystals, Sample Delivery Techniques for serial femtosecond crystallography, data collection methods at XFELs, and more. This book aims to provide the readers with an overview of the new methods that have been recently developed as well as a prospective on new methods under development. It highlights the most important and novel Structural Discoveries made recently with XFELS, contextualized with a big-picture discussion of future developments.

Petra Fromme, Ph.D. is a Regents’ Professor, and Director of the Biodesign Center for Applied Structural Discovery at Arizona State University.  After receiving a Ph.D. in chemistry from the Technical University of Berlin her research career has focused on unravelling the structure and function of photosystem I and II proteins and ATP synthase. She was an integral part of the team who developed the technique of serial femtosecond nanocrystallography for analyzing proteins using high-intensity X-ray Free Electron Lasers (XFEL). With over 200 articles she is a leader in photosynthesis, protein macromolecular crystallography using synchrotrons and protein nanocrystallography using XFELs.

Sébastien Boutet, Ph.D. is a Senior Staff Scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory, affiliated with Stanford University. Dr. Boutet is an experimental physicist who received his PhD from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. His PhD work focused on x-ray method development for coherent x-ray diffractive imaging applied to biological systems using synchrotron radiation. This general interest continued with subsequent work as a postdoctoral researcher at SLAC and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory where his efforts started to focus on Free Electron Laser methods. This work took him to the Linac Coherent Light Source at SLAC where he has been directly involved in the development of instrumentation and methods to utilize FELs for biological research.

Mark Hunter, Ph.D., is a Staff Scientist at SLAC National Accelerator Laboratory affiliated with Stanford University.  Mark received his B.A. in Chemistry from Wilkes University and his Ph.D. in Chemistry from Arizona State University, focusing on technique development in crystallography and coherent X-ray imaging applied to structural biology. He continued his work as a Research Associate at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory before joining LCLS at SLAC. He continues to work on crystallography and imaging for structural biology an instrument scientist in the Hard X-ray Department of LCLS, focusing on the Coherent X-ray Imaging and Macromolecular Femtosecond Crystallography beam lines.