RESUMEN
Postprocessing of diffraction patterns of completely randomly oriented helical particles, as measured, for example, in so-called "diffract-and-destroy" experiments with an x-ray free electron laser can yield "fiber diffraction" patterns expected of fibrous bundles of the particles. This will allow "single-axis alignment" to be performed computationally, thus obviating the need to do this by experimental means such as forming fibers and laser or flow alignment. The structure of such particles may then be found by either iterative phasing methods or standard methods of fiber diffraction.
RESUMEN
The first experimental data from single-particle scattering experiments from free electron lasers (FELs) are now becoming available. The first such experiments are being performed on relatively large objects such as viruses, which produce relatively low-resolution, low-noise diffraction patterns in so-called "diffract-and-destroy" experiments. We describe a very simple test on the angular correlations of measured diffraction data to determine if the scattering is from an icosahedral particle. If this is confirmed, the efficient algorithm proposed can then combine diffraction data from multiple shots of particles in random unknown orientations to generate a full 3D image of the icosahedral particle. We demonstrate this with a simulation for the satellite tobacco necrosis virus (STNV), the atomic coordinates of whose asymmetric unit is given in Protein Data Bank entry 2BUK.